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Sencai accounts

Every cloud resource Sencai provisions has to run on somebody’s account with the provider. You have two options for whose account that is: a Sencai account, which Sencai owns and bills to you, or your own cloud provider account, connected with credentials you supply. A Sencai account is the default, fastest way to get started; connecting your own account is the advanced option and remains fully supported - see Connect a cloud provider for that path. This page covers the Sencai account option in full.

What a Sencai account is

Section titled “What a Sencai account is”

Sencai holds one shared account with each provider and runs resources for many organizations inside it, side by side. Every resource Sencai creates there is permanently marked as belonging to your organization, in a way only the platform controls - you can’t remove or change that marking yourself, and neither can another organization. That marking is what keeps a shared account safely divided and is how your spend is separated from everyone else’s on it.

The trade-off is that a handful of account-wide screens aren’t available yet on a Sencai account - see Not available yet on a shared account below.

Turning it on

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An Owner or Admin turns a Sencai account on, one provider at a time, from your organization’s cloud account settings - the same place your own connected accounts live (Settings → Cloud Credentials). Before it turns on for a provider, you’re shown a short disclosure stating the monthly spend cap that will apply and the fee Sencai charges, and you have to accept it; accepting is what actually turns the option on for that provider, not a checkbox you can skip past. You can withdraw that acceptance later - doing so stops new resources from being provisioned on a Sencai account for that provider, but doesn’t touch anything already running.

Once you’ve accepted, a Sencai account for a provider is issued automatically, with no extra approval step, as long as all of the following are true at the same time:

  • your acceptance for that provider is still in place,
  • your organization has a spend cap configured (Settings → Spend Caps - see Spend caps),
  • the provider is currently offered as a Sencai account - not every provider Sencai supports is; the screen shows you which ones are, and
  • your organization isn’t behind on payment (see Payment, invoices, and failed payments).

Two providers work differently from the rest:

  • OVHcloud isn’t offered as a self-service Sencai account at all today
    • it’s available only by arrangement with your account team.
  • Free organizations need one extra step: the account’s e-mail has to be verified, and Sencai has to approve the request by hand before a Sencai account is issued. A free organization’s Sencai-account spend also carries its own strict ceiling of five euros a month, on top of the spend cap described below.
  • Paid organizations get a Sencai account without that step once Sencai has confirmed the payment. If your plan hasn’t been confirmed yet, the same request-and-approval step applies - without the five-euro ceiling; your organization keeps its own spend cap.

What it costs

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You’re charged the provider’s own price, plus a 2% fee on top - shown as its own line, never folded into the provider’s number. The running total you see day to day is an estimate, built from your current resources priced against Sencai’s price list (including managed databases, object storage, and storage volumes, where a price exists for them) - see Cloud cost calculator for how that pricing works and how fresh it is.

Your actual invoice is never generated from that estimate. It’s built only once Sencai has received the provider’s own invoice, and any conversion from US dollars to euros uses the exchange rate on the day that invoice arrived - not the day you used the resource, and not the day the estimate was last refreshed.

Your spend cap

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A Sencai account can’t be turned on for a provider until your organization has a spend cap set - see Spend caps. For resources running on a Sencai account, that cap is an enforced ceiling, not just an alert:

  • as spend approaches or reaches the cap, you’re warned by e-mail and in the platform;
  • once spend reaches the cap, new resources on that Sencai account are refused;
  • running servers on that Sencai account are powered off once the cap is reached - never deleted.

If payment falls behind

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While a payment is overdue, no new Sencai account can be turned on for the organization. What happens to resources that are already running is described in Payment, invoices, and failed payments. Resources in your own connected cloud accounts are never deleted by Sencai.

Deleting an organization is different: it destroys the organization’s resources on Sencai accounts immediately, with no snapshot, after a preview and an explicit confirmation - see Deleting an organization. Resources in your own accounts are only disconnected, never touched.

Not available yet on a shared account

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Because a Sencai account is shared across organizations, a few account-wide screens that read everything in an account at once aren’t offered against it yet - they’d show other organizations’ resources alongside yours. Today these only work against your own connected account:

Resources you provision on a Sencai account still show up individually everywhere else - in your instance list, inventory, cost records, and the audit log - this limitation is specifically about scanning or managing an entire account’s worth of infrastructure at once.

What’s next

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