Pricing
Cost model for Alien Container resources.
Alien provisions Containers in the customer's cloud. The customer pays the cloud provider for the underlying infrastructure, and Alien charges a small management fee. See Pricing for Alien's current rates.
Cloud cost for Containers is driven by machines, persistent storage, load balancers, data transfer, and any container registry storage or transfer.
Cost Components
| Component | Applies When | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Machines | Every cloud container deployment | Container replicas run on machines in the customer account. Autoscaling changes this cost over time. |
| Persistent disks | .persistentStorage(...) or stateful cloud containers | Billed by size, disk type, provisioned IOPS, and throughput where supported. |
| Ephemeral disks / local SSD | .ephemeralStorage(...) or capacity groups with local disks | Pricing depends on selected instance families and local-disk options. |
| Load balancers | A port is exposed publicly | Billed by provider-specific hourly, rule, capacity-unit, or data-processing dimensions. |
| NAT / egress | Private services need outbound internet access | Created networks use managed NAT; BYO networks use customer-managed egress. |
| Data transfer | Public ingress/egress or cross-zone traffic | Charged by cloud provider and region. |
| Registry storage and pulls | Image storage and deployment pulls | Uses the configured artifact registry. |
Provider Mapping
| Platform | Machines | Persistent Storage | Public Exposure |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | EC2 | EBS | Load balancer and target groups |
| GCP | Compute Engine | Persistent Disk | Google Cloud load balancing |
| Azure | Virtual Machines | Managed Disks | Azure Load Balancer |
| Kubernetes / On-Prem | Cluster nodes | PersistentVolumeClaims | Cluster ingress or service configuration |
| Local | Local machine | Local Docker volumes / bind mounts | Local port forwarding |
Example Cost Shape
For a public two-replica API with a 100 GiB persistent disk:
| Item | Quantity |
|---|---|
| Machines | At least two scheduled replicas plus cluster headroom |
| Persistent storage | 100 GiB per stateful replica that owns a volume |
| Load balancing | One public port |
| Network | NAT and egress if replicas run on private subnets |
| Registry | Image storage plus image pull transfer |
Notes
- Autoscaling reduces idle replica count but does not remove the cost of minimum replicas.
- Stateful replicas generally keep their disks after restarts and reschedules.
- BYO networking shifts NAT, routing, and firewall costs to the customer-managed network.
- GPU containers are priced by the selected GPU instance family and any attached disks.