Billing options for TIR Private Cluster

A private cluster is billed for its nodes, at a fixed rate, whether those nodes are free, allocated, or running a workload. You choose On-Demand, billed by the hour, or a committed plan, paid upfront for a term, when you create the cluster. Cluster Details shows the choice as Hourly or Committed. Rates for every plan are on E2E’s pricing page.

Hourly: every node, every hour

An hourly cluster is billed for every node in it, for every hour the cluster exists. A node is billed for as long as it is part of the cluster, so the only way to stop paying for a node is to delete the cluster.

What happens	What it does to billing
You create the cluster	Every node is billed from now
You allocate a node to a project	Billing stays the same
A service runs on a node	Billing stays the same
You take a node back from its project	Billing stays the same
You add nodes	The new nodes are billed from now
You delete the cluster	Billing stops for every node

Committed: one term, paid upfront

A committed plan suits steady, predictable work; hourly billing suits short or variable work. When you create the cluster, you pay upfront for its nodes for the whole term, at a lower rate than hourly. The longer the term, the lower the effective hourly rate per node. The terms on offer depend on the plan.

What happens	What it does to billing
You create the cluster	The whole term is charged upfront
The cluster runs	The upfront charge covers the committed nodes for the term
You add nodes	The new nodes are billed by the hour, outside the term
You delete the cluster before the term ends	No refund for the time left

A committed cluster stays on committed billing until its term ends, and you cannot move it to hourly billing before then. What happens then is the choice you made when you created the cluster.

What happens when a committed term ends

You choose one of three end-of-term actions when you create the cluster:

Choice	What happens
Auto Renewal	Buys another term at the current committed rate, for the nodes under commitment
Convert to Hourly Plan	Switches the cluster to hourly billing
Auto Delete	Removes the cluster

Auto Renewal goes ahead by itself, and TIR emails you once the renewal has gone through. It renews only the nodes in the original commitment: nodes you added later keep billing by the hour. If your account’s balance is too low to cover the renewal, the cluster switches to hourly billing instead.

What is free

Allocating and deallocating nodes within the cluster is free.

Deploying an instance, a model endpoint, a training cluster, a Slurm cluster, or a vector database inside a private cluster is included in what you pay for the cluster’s nodes. See Launch services on a private cluster.

Creating and attaching a security group, attaching a VPC IP, and managing IAM roles and access policies on a private cluster are free as well.

What is billed separately

A Shared File System, Parallel File System, or dataset attached to a service inside the cluster is billed on its own, and keeps being billed after you delete the cluster. Delete each one where you manage it once you are done with it.

For short answers on charges, see the TIR Private Cluster FAQ.