Billing and plans for pipeline runs

A pipeline run is billed for the time its steps run, on the plan you chose for the run. For the price of each plan, see E2E’s pricing page.

What is billed

• Each step is billed by the minute at the plan’s hourly price, from when its container starts until it ends. Time a step spends waiting to start is free. The start and the end each round up to the next full minute.
• A run has one plan. You choose a single plan when you create the run, and every step is billed at that plan’s price, even when a step needs only a CPU. Steps that run at the same time are each billed, and the run’s charge is their total.
• Each run a schedule starts is billed on its own, from its own duration and the plan you chose.
• Data you keep in object storage is billed under object storage pricing, separately from the run.

Pipelines, versions, and experiments themselves are free. You pay for a schedule only through the runs it starts.

Plans

A plan is a CPU configuration, shown as vCPUs and RAM, or a GPU configuration, shown as GPU count, vCPUs, and RAM. The run form lists them under Select Computing Resource on the GPU and CPU tabs, and you can pick any plan that has free capacity. When you create a run on an hourly plan from a prepaid account, you need credit for about 24 hours of the plan’s hourly price. A postpaid account skips this credit check.

Keeping the cost down

• Use a CPU plan for data preparation, file transfers, evaluation, and steps that only coordinate other steps, and a GPU plan for training and fine-tuning. Because a run has one plan, you can split work into separate runs when the steps need different plans.
• Retry a failed run instead of starting a new one, so the steps that already finished are skipped.
• Break a large pipeline into smaller steps, so that only a failed step needs to run again.
• Store intermediate results in an object storage bucket, so a retry after a later failure can reuse them.
• Turn off or delete schedules you have finished with.
• Delete runs, versions, and pipelines once their work is done.