Cloud cost calculator

Before you provision anything, Sencai can tell you what it will cost - per provider, per region, per resource. This page explains what that number actually means: how fresh it is, whether it includes Sencai’s own margin, what currency it’s in, and which orders get their price checked again right before they go through. For what you pay Sencai itself, see Billing overview; this page is entirely about the price of the cloud resources you provision through it.

Where to find it

The Cost calculator button on the dashboard, and the same button on the Cloud Instances list, both open the calculator (/gravity/calculator). Pick a provider, a region, and a resource, and add as many lines as you want to compare or add up - nothing here provisions anything by itself.

The same pricing engine also prices things inline wherever you’re actually about to buy something - the region/instance-type step of provisioning a new instance, and a resize. A blueprint shows its own author-set cost estimate at deployment time instead of this live pricing - see that page for how it’s set.

Live, Not current, and Unavailable

Every price line carries one of three states, shown as a small badge:

Badge	What it means
Live	A real price was measured from the provider within the last 24 hours. This is the only state a total adds up.
Not current	A real price exists but is older than 24 hours. The number still shows, with its age, but it’s excluded from any total so an old figure never quietly inflates or deflates what you’re comparing.
Unavailable	No usable price exists for that exact provider/region/resource combination - either nobody has measured one yet, or the platform doesn’t price that kind of resource for this provider at all.

For most kinds of resource, the calculator lists them for the provider and region you picked whether or not a price is actually available yet - an unpriced one simply shows as Unavailable rather than being left off the list. Two exceptions: GPU instances, managed databases, and managed caches only show up once a real price has actually been found for that provider, so an unpriced one is missing entirely rather than shown as Unavailable; and CDN and container registry resources aren’t listed by the calculator at all yet, for any provider.

Coverage varies a lot by provider and keeps growing. As a rough sense of where things stand: virtual machines are priced live for every provider currently offered in the calculator; beyond virtual machines, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and UpCloud currently have the widest live coverage (most of the resource kinds the calculator tracks); Hetzner prices a solid core set live - virtual machines, block storage, snapshots, backups, floating IPs, load balancers, and data transfer; DigitalOcean, for now, prices only virtual machines live, with everything else showing as Unavailable until a price source exists for it. IBM Cloud isn’t offered as a provider in the calculator yet at all (see Connect a cloud provider).

A resource that’s genuinely free (a private network on most providers, for example) or genuinely not sold by a provider is marked as such rather than shown as an error - that’s a fact about the resource, not a gap in pricing.

Your own cloud provider account vs Sencai-managed capacity

The price you see depends on how the resource would be billed:

• Your own cloud provider account (the default, and the only self-service option today) - Sencai shows you the provider’s own price, exactly as the provider charges it. No margin, no tax added on this screen.
• Sencai-managed capacity - resources Sencai provisions and bills to your organization on its own account (see Sencai accounts for how to turn this on). Here the price includes a 2% fee on top of the provider’s own price, plus Czech VAT, both shown as their own line so you can always see the provider’s price separately from what Sencai adds.

The calculator doesn’t know about your connected accounts - it’s a credential-free preview - so you tell it which one applies yourself, with the Whose bill is this? toggle above the results: Your own account (the provider invoices you directly; Sencai adds nothing to the figure) or Sencai account (Sencai buys from the provider and invoices you, so the total also carries Sencai’s margin and Czech VAT). Switching it re-prices everything on the screen.

Native currency and the daily exchange rate

Most providers publish their own prices directly in EUR, and those show up exactly as published. A provider that only publishes in USD gets converted using a real daily exchange rate, refreshed at least once every 24 hours - never a fixed, hand-typed rate. If a fresh rate genuinely can’t be fetched, the calculator falls back to the last rate it does have rather than inventing one, and marks that line as not current, the same as an aging price.

Usage profiles: what actually changes the number

By default, the calculator prices a resource for a full calendar month (hours vary slightly - a shorter or longer month, and the day the clocks change, are both accounted for). You can instead ask it to price a resource for business hours only or a custom schedule, which lowers the figure for anything genuinely billed by the hour.

Two things that usage profile deliberately does not change:

• Resources some providers bill for existing, not for running. A handful of providers charge for a server for as long as it exists, whether it’s powered on or not - for those, the calculator always prices the full month regardless of the usage profile you picked, and says so.
• Managed databases and managed caches. Most of these can’t be stopped by you at all (or only briefly), so a usage profile would understate what you’ll actually be charged. These are always priced for the full month.

An estimate, not an invoice

Every figure the calculator shows - live, not current, or a last-known number you’ve chosen to accept anyway - is for planning, not a bill. Nothing shown here is itself a charge.

What you’re actually charged depends on which of the two above applies. With your own account, the provider invoices you directly - Sencai never sees or converts that money, so the calculator’s number is purely an estimate to compare against your own provider’s bill. With Sencai account capacity, Sencai’s own invoice to you follows the provider’s actual invoice, converted at the exchange rate on the day Sencai receives it - not the day you ran the calculator, and not the daily rate the calculator itself used for its preview.

What gets checked again before an order

For virtual machines and resizing one, private networks, and DNS zones, Sencai quietly re-checks the price immediately before the order actually goes through. If it changed enough to matter since you last looked, you’ll be shown the new number and asked to confirm it before anything is created. If a specific size or type is no longer sold by the provider in that region at all, the order is refused outright rather than being sent somewhere it would fail anyway.

Deploying a blueprint also gets a fresh price check and the same no-longer-sold refusal right before it creates anything - but without asking you to confirm a changed price first, since a blueprint deployment doesn’t show you a live number to begin with (it shows its own author-set cost estimate, not this calculator’s pricing).

Other resource kinds the calculator can price (storage, snapshots, backups, and so on) are for planning today - ordering them doesn’t yet re-check the price at the last moment the way the resources above do.

A public preview, coming to sencai.space

Being introduced: a version of this calculator that needs no account - usable directly from sencai.space - has been built and is going through final checks before it’s switched on for visitors. It will only ever show your own cloud provider account’s pricing (no organization, no margin, no tax), since a visitor has no organization yet.

What’s next

• Provision & manage instances - where instance-level pricing shows up during an actual order
• Blueprints & catalog - the author-set cost estimate a blueprint shows instead of this live pricing
• Cloud cost management - what you’ve actually spent with your providers, as opposed to what something would cost
• Spend caps - setting a monthly spending limit, a separate mechanism from the calculator on this page
• Sencai accounts - how the 2% fee and Sencai’s own invoicing actually work