Accounts, quota & billing

Vrtmv meters and bills on distinct migrated VMs. Analysis is generous; only real migrations to non-free targets count.

What is billable

A usage event is billable-eligible only when all hold:

  • its kind is migration (preflight and readiness checks are always free);
  • the target is not a free target (migrations to Red Hat Enterprise Linux are free);
  • the account is not on an unlimited plan.

Billing counts distinct VMs by fingerprint, so re-migrating the same VM does not bill twice.

The waterfall

Each account's position is computed as a waterfall:

  1. Free quota — a number of billable VMs included at no charge.
  2. Prepaid credits — an append-only, auditable ledger of granted or purchased credits.
  3. On-demand — beyond free quota and credits, additional VMs are invoiced per VM.

GET /v1/account returns this summary — free quota, billable VMs, credits total/used/remaining, on-demand VMs, and amount due — which is what an account page renders.

Enforcement

  • A non-paying account whose free quota and credits are exhausted is refused a new billable migration with 402 Payment Required.
  • A paying account soft-overages into invoiced on-demand usage rather than being blocked.
  • An absolute hard cap applies to every non-unlimited account: once it reaches the per-account VM limit, further billable migrations are hard-blocked with 402 until the limit is raised. Unlimited accounts (negotiated large estates) are exempt.

Feasibility checks (preflight, readiness) and free-target migrations are never gated.

Data boundary

Metering carries only a one-way VM fingerprint and the release pair — never host identity or workload data. See Security posture.