Auto-stop at $0: how we make sure your cloud bill never surprises you

Almost every horror story a new cloud customer tells starts the same way: "I forgot to turn it off, and then…" We built DeskBoot's billing around the assumption that people forget. Here's the actual behavior — with numbers.

Prepaid balance is the first line

DeskBoot is prepaid, not invoiced. You top up an amount you're comfortable with, and compute runs against that balance. There's no credit line, no invoice that arrives at the end of the month with a bigger number than expected. Whatever balance you added is the ceiling.

Auto-stop at $0

When your balance hits zero, running sessions are automatically stopped — not terminated. Stopping preserves the disk (encrypted, in-place) and stops the compute meter. The only ongoing cost is storage (~$0.08/GB/mo), which is 20–40 cents per session per month depending on size.

The auto-stop is driven by a per-minute EventBridge cron that ticks every DeskBoot account. If your balance goes below the threshold and you have running instances, they're issued a stop within one billing tick — so the maximum "runaway" from balance-hit-zero to compute-stopped is about a minute of compute time. Not a day. Not an hour. A minute.

Low-balance emails

You get emails at three thresholds:

• 4 hours of runway remaining, based on your currently-running sessions' hourly rate
• 1 hour remaining
• Auto-stop triggered (a.k.a. "you hit $0")

We use the currently-running rate, not the average — so if you switched from Starter to Pro and your burn quadrupled, the warning arrives at 4h of Pro-tier runway, not 4h of averaged-across-history burn.

The one thing you still have to remember

Storage. Stopping the box stops compute, not storage. If you never come back, the disk accrues ~$0.08/GB/mo indefinitely. For a Starter (60 GiB) that's about $5/month; for a Pro (400 GiB) it's about $32/month. Not runaway money, but not zero.

If you're done with a session for good, click Terminate. Terminate wipes the disk, releases the storage, and stops all further billing. Auto-stop is a safety net for "I forgot for an afternoon"; termination is the actual "I'm done" signal.

Why we built it this way

The pattern we wanted to avoid: customer signs up, launches a session, forgets it for two weeks, gets a $180 bill, angrily deletes their account, tells everyone we're expensive. Auto-stop turns that $180 disaster into a $2 storage charge and a slightly-annoyed customer who can just top up and resume. Small change; big shift in trust.

If you've been burned by AWS invoices before, this is the specific mechanism that makes DeskBoot different.