Billing & Plans

This guide covers the Arbitex Cloud plan tiers, what each tier includes, how usage is tracked and enforced, and how organisations change plans. For the billing dashboard UI and CSV export workflows, see Cloud Portal Billing & Usage.

Plan Tiers

Arbitex Cloud offers five plan tiers. All new organisations start on the Free tier via self-serve signup.

Tier	Monthly Price	Target
Free	$0	Individual developers evaluating the platform
Developer Pro	$49	Solo developers and small projects in production
Team	$199	Teams needing collaboration, SSO, and advanced DLP
Enterprise	$499	Organisations with compliance requirements and unlimited scale
Enterprise Outpost	$999	Organisations requiring on-premises deployment with air-gap support

Plan Limits

Quantitative limits enforced per billing period (calendar month):

Metric	Free	Developer Pro	Team	Enterprise	Enterprise Outpost
API calls / month	10,000	250,000	2,000,000	Unlimited	Unlimited
DLP scans / month	5,000	100,000	1,000,000	Unlimited	Unlimited
Data processed / month	1 GB	10 GB	100 GB	Unlimited	Unlimited
Team seats	1	3	20	Unlimited	Unlimited
API keys	3	10	50	Unlimited	Unlimited
Outpost nodes	0	1	3	Unlimited	Unlimited

Feature Matrix

Feature	Free	Developer Pro	Team	Enterprise	Enterprise Outpost
AI models	2 models	All models	All models	All + custom	All + custom
DLP protection	Basic (regex)	DLP + NER	DLP + NER + DeBERTa	Full DLP stack	Full DLP stack
SSO / Identity providers	—	—	OIDC / SAML	OIDC / SAML / WebAuthn	OIDC / SAML / WebAuthn
On-premises outposts	—	—	1 outpost	Unlimited	Unlimited
Support	Community	Email	Priority email	Dedicated CSM	Dedicated CSM + SLA
Compliance	—	SOC 2 ready	SOC 2 + HIPAA	Full suite	Full suite + air-gap

DLP protection tiers

Basic (regex): Built-in regex patterns for common PII (credit card numbers, SSNs, email addresses). Available on all plans.
DLP + NER: Adds named entity recognition for contextual detection (names, addresses, phone numbers in natural language).
DLP + NER + DeBERTa: Adds transformer-based classification for nuanced content categories (medical records, legal documents, financial data).
Full DLP stack: All detection methods plus custom model training and policy simulation.

Usage Metering

What counts as an API call

Every request that reaches the Arbitex AI Gateway counts as an API call, including requests that are blocked by DLP rules. Health check endpoints (/health, /ready, /healthz, /readyz) do not count.

What counts as a DLP scan

Each request where DLP inspection runs counts as a scan. This includes policy simulation (dry-run) requests. Blocked and redacted requests both count.

Data processed

Measured as the total bytes transferred in both directions (prompt + response), converted to gigabytes for display.

Quota reset

Usage counters reset at 00:00 UTC on the 1st of each calendar month. There is no rollover of unused quota.

Cost estimates

The billing dashboard displays an estimated cost calculated as:

Token rate: $3.00 per 1M tokens ($0.000003 per token)
Data volume: estimated from token count (tokens × 0.000004 GB)

Quota Enforcement

Usage is tracked in real-time via the Platform service. The Cloud Portal caches usage metrics for 60 seconds to reduce backend load.

Warning levels

Level	Condition	Behaviour
`normal`	All metrics below 75%	No action
`warning`	Any metric 75–89%	`X-Usage-Warning` header added to responses
`critical`	Any metric 90–99%	`X-Usage-Throttle: active` header added
`blocked`	Any metric ≥ 100%	HTTP 429 Too Many Requests returned

The Usage Throttle middleware (layer 5 in the middleware stack) enforces these thresholds on every request. The overage threshold for billing dashboard alerts is 80%.

Overage alerts

When any metric exceeds 80% of the plan limit, the billing dashboard displays an overage alert. The GET /v1/orgs/{org_id}/billing/usage/dashboard endpoint returns overage_alerts as human-readable strings:

{
  "overage_alerts": [
    "API calls usage at 85% of plan limit (212,500 / 250,000)"
  ]
}

Upgrade and Downgrade

How plan changes work

Plan tier changes are admin-only operations — there is no self-serve upgrade UI in the current release. An administrator changes the plan tier via the Cloud API:

PATCH /v1/orgs/{org_id}
Authorization: X-API-Key <admin-key>
Content-Type: application/json

{"plan_tier": "team_saas"}

Plan tier values

The API uses internal tier identifiers:

Display name	API value
Free	`devfree_saas`
Developer Pro	`devpro_saas`
Team	`team_saas`
Enterprise	`enterprise_saas`
Enterprise Outpost	`enterprise_outpost`

What happens on plan change

The plan_tier is updated immediately in the Cloud database.
A background task pushes updated entitlements to the Platform service via the mTLS-protected provisioner endpoint.
Platform refreshes rate limits and feature gates for the organisation.

Billing cycle

Billing is monthly, starting on the 1st of each calendar month.
The renewal_date in plan info responses is always the 1st of the next month.
There is no proration for mid-cycle plan changes in the current release.

Cancellation

Organisation cancellation (DELETE /v1/orgs/{org_id}) soft-deletes the organisation:

Status set to cancelled
Data retained for 90 days
API access disabled immediately
A deprovision job cleans up Platform-side resources

Billing Webhook Events

Organisations can receive billing events via webhooks. Three billing event types are supported:

Event type	Trigger
`quota_exceeded`	Current requests meet or exceed the monthly plan limit
`usage_threshold`	Usage crosses a threshold (80%, 90%, or 100% of a limit)
`invoice_generated`	New invoice created for the billing period

Delivery mechanics

Signing: HMAC-SHA256. Signature header: X-Webhook-Signature.
Payload envelope: {"event_type": "...", "payload": {...}, "timestamp": "<ISO-8601>"}.
Retry policy: 5 attempts maximum with exponential backoff (1s, 2s, 4s, 8s, 16s by default).
Per-org config: max_retries, backoff_base, and timeout_seconds can be customised per organisation.
Dead letter: After all retries are exhausted, the payload is archived to the dead letter table for manual inspection.

Fire a test billing webhook event:

POST /v1/orgs/{org_id}/billing/webhooks/fire
X-API-Key: <admin-key>
Content-Type: application/json

{"event_type": "usage_threshold", "payload": {"metric": "api_calls", "percent": 80}}

Notification Preferences

Users can configure per-category notification preferences, including a billing category. Categories: security, system, billing, dlp.

Billing notifications appear in the Cloud Portal notification centre and can be configured per-user to control which billing events trigger in-portal alerts.

Plan Information API

Retrieve the current plan details and feature list:

GET /v1/orgs/{org_id}/plan
Authorization: Bearer <token>

Response:

{
  "plan_name": "Team",
  "plan_tier": "team_saas",
  "billing_cycle": "monthly",
  "renewal_date": "2026-04-01",
  "features": [
    {"key": "requests", "label": "Monthly API calls", "value": "2M"},
    {"key": "models", "label": "AI models", "value": "All models"},
    {"key": "seats", "label": "Team seats", "value": "20 seats"},
    {"key": "dlp", "label": "DLP protection", "value": "DLP + NER + DeBERTa"},
    {"key": "sso", "label": "SSO / IdP", "value": "OIDC / SAML"},
    {"key": "outposts", "label": "On-prem outposts", "value": "1 outpost"},
    {"key": "support", "label": "Support", "value": "Priority email"},
    {"key": "compliance", "label": "Compliance", "value": "SOC 2 + HIPAA"}
  ]
}