Pricing structure

Executive summary

The Nuvolos platform natively provides compute resources and configurable tools for computational research and educational use cases, as well as for combinations of both.

The pricing structure of Nuvolos consists of two parts: the Nuvolos subscription and on-demand resources. The Nuvolos subscription is based on your contract with us and runs on an annual basis (different terms are possible by agreement). The on-demand resources are additional resources that can be purchased with Credits on top of those provided by the Nuvolos subscription. You can have a Nuvolos subscription without Credits, but you cannot spend Credits on Nuvolos without a subscription. Resources include compute capability and storage (see below).

With a Nuvolos subscription, you can have one or more resource pools, which are logical groups of resources. They can be either shared or dedicated. In this overview, we will briefly explain each of these concepts in more detail.

The Nuvolos subscription

A subscription to Nuvolos is based on a yearly contract signed between you and the company that develops Nuvolos, ALPHACRUNCHER AG (or ALPHACRUNCHER Inc.). The subscription is tailored to your specific use case and requirements; there are no fixed tiers or plans for Nuvolos subscriptions. Instead, you provide us with your particular use case and approximate number of users, and we determine the estimated annual seats and resources you will need based on that information.

The base subscription consists of the following parts for a given subscription period:

• Access

• Compute allocation

• Storage allocation

The cost of the Nuvolos subscription is based on the number of seats associated with the access component and the quantity of compute and storage resources allocated on an annual basis. The size of the resource components and the access component are not linked. This approach ensures what you pay is always custom-tailored to your actual resource needs, preventing overpayment for underutilized plans or tiers typical of SaaS offerings.

In general terms, a subscription allocates to the subscriber a certain number of seats (we distinguish between full-time and part-time users), a certain number of compute units or CUs, and a certain amount of high-performance storage capacity.

Seats limit concurrent active user access to the platform. We monitor compliance with the agreement by reviewing average concurrent utilization rates. The compute units (CUs) can be spent on concurrent usage of applications (such as Airflow, VSCode, and Spyder) up to the maximum total amount allocated to you based on your subscription. The unit of measurement is compute unit hours (CUhours), and your agreement states a term total. The subscription's resource allocation is always for an average usage over the year. To allow for the flexibility necessary for research, your subscription permits short-term fluctuations in usage that exceed the allocated CUs.

Credits

In addition to the general Nuvolos subscription, you can purchase Credits. These are units of measure for on-demand resources. They provide access to additional CUs, as well as special allocations such as dedicated resource pools, special kinds of storage, and professional services.

Credits can be bought at the rate of 8 Euros or 9 USD per Credit. You can purchase Credits at any time as long as you have a Nuvolos subscription. Any unused Credits will roll over to the next year provided you renew your Nuvolos subscription. Credits cannot be acquired or used independently of a Nuvolos subscription.

Credits can be applied to any resources available through Microsoft Azure cloud services, including specific compute needs, GPUs, storage types, and more.

Application resource accounting

Each application on Nuvolos has a size, which determines both the resources it uses and how the costs of these resources are covered. Each size belongs to one of the following categories:

• Sizes included in plan ("Included")

• Credit-based sizes purchasable with credits ("Credit")

Whenever you run an application at a size included in your plan, the resource usage is recorded in CUs. This resource usage is regularly compared against your subscription limits (as described above). Sizes included in the plan do not come with resource guarantees. An application with 4 CUs can use up to 4 vCPUs and 16 GB RAM of a larger machine. Based on the load generated by other platform users, it may only be able to use fewer resources at peak load. You can set how many CUs an application will have available as resources by changing the application size yourself. Self-service changes within the platform are possible between 1 and 16 CUs.

By contrast, if you run an app at a credit-based size, the application's resource pool will be charged in Credits according to its price. Credit-based sizes need to be enabled by a space administrator in each space.

Credit charges start when the application starts and stop when the application stops—either due to inactivity, shortage of credits, or the end user stopping the app. During runtime, credit charges are accounted for every 15 seconds.

Credit-based sizes run on dedicated compute nodes, so CPU and RAM resources are guaranteed to be exclusively available for the application, regardless of other platform users.

Resource pools

There are two types of resource pools: shared and dedicated. The standard Nuvolos subscription provides NCUs from a shared resource pool.

Shared resource pool

In the shared resource pool, all applications you run draw from the same resource allocation—your general allocation of NCUs. A shared resource pool is essentially a certain amount of vCPU and RAM that is configured identically and dedicated to running all applications you choose to run.

Dedicated resource pool

You can also draw from a dedicated resource pool. This is a resource pool configured specifically to optimize for one particular application, and only one application will draw on it at a time. This is useful when you need particularly heavy or unusual compute usage for a specific application (such as a High Performance Computing use case).

Applications on dedicated resource pools can scale between 8 vCPUs/32 GB RAM and 120 vCPUs/456 GB RAM. As with shared resource pools, you can scale as needed using the Nuvolos platform.

Unlike the regular NCU allocation from a shared resource pool, usage of a dedicated resource pool requires purchasing additional Credits corresponding to the intended usage.

Storage

By default, the Nuvolos subscription includes sufficient storage for your use case. The storage provision is based on our high-performance file system, backed by Snowflake as our database provider.

Specific storage needs, such as SQL-compliant table storage and large file storage for unusually large volumes of unstructured data, can be purchased as additional services using Credits.

Cost control

You can exercise cost control in various ways.

First, self-service scaling of resources combined with the ability to allocate budgets of resources or resource types gives you substantial flexibility in how and when you use the resources available to you.

Second, for academic institutional use cases, NCU availability is tailored to the academic year. This means NCUs allocated to you will be available for a certain number of hours within the academic year, excluding the summer break period. This lowers the cost of the subscription, ensuring you do not pay for resource availability during a period when the resources are likely to go unused. For details on time constraints on NCU availability, refer to our documentation on NCU architecture.