Pricing
Pay per compute-second. No idle charges. Free tier for self-hosted.
Free
$0
self-hosted, unlimited
- Run on your own hardware
- Unlimited sandboxes
- All templates included
- Custom templates
- No telemetry
Pro
$0.000011
per vCPU-second
- 200 free hours/month
- Managed infrastructure
- E2E encryption
- Usage dashboard
- Priority support
Enterprise
Custom
volume discounts
- Dedicated bare metal
- Custom SLAs
- Volume discounts
- Private deployment
- Dedicated support
How billing works
You're billed for compute time only. The meter starts when a sandbox enters the ready state and stops when it is destroyed.
| Metric | Unit | Price |
|---|---|---|
| vCPU time | per vCPU-second | $0.000011 |
| Memory | included with vCPU | -- |
| Storage | session ephemeral | -- |
| Network | egress | Free (fair use) |
Example costs
| Workload | Config | Duration | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code session | 2 vCPU, 2 GiB | 30 min | $0.040 |
| CI pipeline | 2 vCPU, 512 MiB | 5 min | $0.007 |
| Data analysis | 2 vCPU, 512 MiB | 2 min | $0.003 |
| 200 hours/month (free tier) | 2 vCPU | 200 hr | $0.000 |
Free tier details
The Pro plan includes 200 free vCPU-hours per month. That's equivalent to:
- 400 thirty-minute Claude Code sessions (2 vCPU each)
- 2,400 five-minute CI runs (2 vCPU each)
- Any combination that totals 720,000 vCPU-seconds
Unused free hours do not roll over. If you exceed the free tier, you're billed at $0.000011/vCPU-second for the overage.
Self-hosted
upstream is open source. Run it on your own hardware with zero cost and zero limits. Requirements:
- Linux host with KVM support
- Firecracker v1.14.1+
- containerd
- At least 4 GiB RAM (for the controller + one sandbox)
Self-hosted deployments get access to the same templates, the same API, and the same SDK. The only difference is you manage the metal.
Track your usage
from upstream import Upstream
client = Upstream(api_key="sk-...")
usage = client.usage()
print(f"Sessions: {usage.total_sessions}")
print(f"Compute: {usage.total_vcpu_seconds:.0f} vCPU-seconds")Or via the API:
$ curl -X POST https://api.upstream.build/upstream.platform.v1.Platform/GetUsage \
-H "Authorization: Bearer sk-..." \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"since": "2026-04-01T00:00:00Z"}'