Hosting

How hosting is paid for, how to top up, what happens when the balance runs out and how to come back, and how to take a site down.

How does hosting billing work?

Hosting is prepaid and metered on usage: compute, database, CDN and storage. Each month's usage comes first out of your plan's hosting allowance ($10 a month on Pro, $25 on Power), then out of your hosting credit, soonest-expiring credit first. When both are used up the balance goes negative, and a balance that stays negative ends with your apps being taken offline (see below).

Floot does not charge your card for hosting on its own. The only automatic charge is auto-reload, which is off unless you turn it on. The allowance starts again every month, on yearly plans too. It does not roll over, and it is not shown as part of your balance. On a paid plan, if your balance is negative when the new month's allowance arrives, the allowance pays that debt first and the rest covers the month's usage.

Free accounts have no recurring allowance. New accounts get a one-time $3 hosting credit, which is enough to put a first app live; it is valid for a year and is not refilled. Older credit-ladder plans all carry the same flat $10, whatever their credit tier.

Where can I see my hosting usage?

On the hosting dashboard, which is the Hosting tab of Plan & usage. You can also just ask your AI assistant — it can read your hosting and Lambda usage through the connector and suggest ways to bring costs down.

Balance: Your hosting credit: the signup credit plus anything you bought. It does not include your plan's monthly allowance, so upgrading does not add to it.
Spend this period: Only what was taken from that balance this period, after the allowance. It is not your total usage.
Where it's going, Daily charges: Usage broken down by service and by day. Further down, the page lists usage per project.

Usage is charged once a day, for the day before, so today's usage is not on the page yet.

What drives hosting costs up?

Hosting is not only visitors. Scheduled and background jobs, database compute, storage and data transfer all count, whether or not anyone is browsing the app. The usual causes of a bill that is higher than expected:

Large images and video served on every page load
Polling loops that hit your backend far more often than they need to
Runaway client-side effects that fire requests in a tight loop
Jobs that rewrite the same database rows over and over: database storage counts the last 7 days of changes kept for recovery, not only the data's current size

If something unusual shows up, Floot temporarily caps that app's concurrency to keep it and everything around it healthy, lifts the cap automatically once traffic settles, and the team follows up if it keeps happening — see Reliability and limits.

To find out what an app costs to run, publish it, let it run under real use for a week or two, and read the daily figures on the hosting dashboard.

How do I add hosting credit, and does it expire?

On a paid plan, click Top up on the hosting dashboard. The minimum is $10, in steps of $5, and you get what you pay for: $10 buys $10 of hosting. Hosting credit is non-refundable and lasts 365 days from purchase.

A free account cannot buy hosting credit or use auto-reload; it has to upgrade first. Credit you bought while on a paid plan stays usable after the plan ends, until it is used up or expires.

Can Floot top up automatically? Is there a spending cap?

Yes to the first: Auto-reload, on the hosting dashboard, on a paid plan. It is off unless you turn it on. You choose a threshold and a target (to start with, below $5, top up to $20) and Floot charges your saved card for the difference whenever the balance drops below the threshold. It becomes available after your first top-up, charges at most once every 6 hours, and switches itself off after 3 failed charges in a row.

For the second, there is a daily hosting limit: once your published apps have used it in a day, they pause until your day resets instead of running up the bill. On a paid plan you choose the amount on the Hosting tab of Plan & usage; the free plan has a fixed limit. See Daily hosting limit. With auto-reload off nothing is charged automatically: usage keeps drawing the balance down, and once it is negative the next section applies. To stop an app using hosting altogether, unpublish it. AI credits have a separate auto-reload — see Billing, credits, and plans.

What happens if I run out of hosting credit?

Your app is taken offline. Your data is kept, but the *.floot.app subdomain is released and can be claimed by someone else, so coming back is a fresh publish rather than a switch flip. Any custom domain attached to it is removed first. Until the balance is paid, the database can't be opened or downloaded.

Some things stop earlier. From the moment the balance goes negative, even while your apps are still up, you cannot publish, create or duplicate projects, or export or import a database.

How much warning you get

A paid plan in good standing gets a grace window of up to 3 days with warning emails first. The window is cut to about a day when the overdraft is far above your normal hosting spend, and scheduled jobs and recurring background tasks in your published apps pause as soon as the balance runs out. Free accounts, cancelled plans, plans already pending cancellation, and cards that have been failing for more than two weeks are taken down with no grace period at all. On a paid plan, top up from the hosting dashboard before you get there. A free account cannot buy hosting credit, so it has to upgrade first.

How do I bring my apps back after a takedown?

1
Pay off the balance
On a paid plan, click Top up on the hosting dashboard and add enough to bring the balance above zero. Your databases are switched back on by themselves, with the same data.
2
Publish each app again
The takedown released each app's *.floot.app name, so choose the name again when you publish. If someone else has taken it in the meantime, you will need another one.
3
Add each custom domain again
Custom domains were removed with the takedown. Add them back from the Publish screen — see How to add a custom domain.

On a paid plan, unused hosting allowance pays a negative balance before anything else: when a new month starts, and when an upgrade or plan change starts a new paid period. When that pays off the whole debt, your databases come back by themselves; whatever the allowance does not cover still needs a top-up. A free account has no allowance, so upgrading clears a takedown by itself only when the new plan's hosting allowance covers what you owe. If it does not, top up as well.

How do I unpublish my site?

Ask your assistant to unpublish the app. That call never counts against your daily build actions, so you can always take an app offline, even after hitting your limit.

You can also do it yourself: open your project on floot.com, click Publish, then the Unpublish icon next to your live URL, and confirm Delete subdomain. If a custom domain is attached, remove it first from its Domain settings (the cog next to the domain) — until then, Delete subdomain stays disabled.

Either way the subdomain is released and someone else can publish to it, so pick the name again quickly if you plan to come back.

Unpublishing is how you pause a project: the live app goes offline, and the project, its preview and its data stay. It does not bring hosting to zero. Database and file storage keep counting, and using the preview or having your assistant query the database still uses database compute. Only deleting the project stops every charge, and that cannot be undone.

How do I change my floot.app address?

To change a *.floot.app address, remove any custom domain (the cog next to the domain, then Remove custom domain), unpublish, publish again under the new name, and add the custom domain back. The old name is released as soon as you unpublish. More about publishing is in Publishing your app.