Pricing
Daemon has no separate Alien infrastructure charge.
Local
Local daemons run on the developer or operator machine. There is no cloud provider bill from Alien.
Kubernetes / On-Prem
Kubernetes daemons consume the cluster resources requested by their image and runtime environment. The cost is whatever the cluster operator pays for nodes, storage, networking, and registry pulls.
| Component | Applies When | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Cluster nodes | Always | The daemon runs as a pod on existing cluster capacity. |
| Registry storage and pulls | Image-based daemons | Charged by the configured registry. |
| Logs and telemetry | If enabled by the environment | Cost depends on the cluster observability stack. |
| Kubernetes Secrets | Linked resources with secret material | Usually included in cluster control-plane/storage costs. |
AWS, GCP, Azure
Cloud daemons run once on every eligible machine in the selected Alien Machines cluster. They do not create a separate VM per Daemon, but they consume CPU and memory from that cluster and can add registry, logging, networking, and load-balancer costs.
| Component | Applies When | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Cluster machines | Always | Charged as part of the selected Machines cluster's VM capacity. |
| Registry storage and pulls | Always | Charged by ECR, Artifact Registry, or ACR. |
| Logs and telemetry | If enabled | Charged by the configured observability backend and cloud egress rules. |
| Load balancer and DNS | Public endpoint configured | Provider load-balancing and DNS charges apply. |
Cost Control
- Keep daemon images small: every eligible machine pulls each new version.
- Use Container instead of Daemon when you need explicit CPU, memory, scaling, ports, or persistent storage.
- Use Worker instead of Daemon when work can be handled as bounded request-response execution.