To make our billing model as transparent as possible, we put together this article that explains how and what you are billed. There are three different line items you may see on your monthly invoice:

• Subscription
• Infrastructure and resources
• Active security layer

Invoices generated by MedStack are in USD.

Subscription

There are three tiers of subscriptions on MedStack Control that can be reviewed on our pricing page.

• Startup
• Scaleup

Each subscription can be purchased as either a monthly or an annual subscription. Annual subscriptions are 20% less expensive per month than monthly subscriptions.

Monthly subscriptions

Monthly subscriptions are prepaid. This means they are invoiced immediately and renew every month after the start date. The start date of the monthly subscription aligns with the start date of the infrastructure billing period.

Annual subscriptions

Annual subscriptions are prepaid. This means they are invoiced immediately and renew every year from the start date. The start date of the annual subscription aligns with the start date of the infrastructure billing period.

Passed-through costs

When you build resources in MedStack Control, they're provisioned within MedStack's cloud provider tenant and tagged with your company ID.

Each month, we pass the costs incurred by resources tagged with your company ID from the cloud provider through to you. We also install third-party tools on your resources to enable MedStack Control's privacy compliance guarantees. The costs of these tools are also passed through to you.

The infrastructure billing period covers a one month period of infrastructure, resources and tools usage from the start date of a MedStack Control subscription, and recurs every month. These costs are passed-through to you from the service providers.

SKUs

The approximate costs are estimated for resources provisioned in the East US region and vary across different regions.

All virtual machines are installed with a 32 GB SSD that is accounted for in the approximate cost.

The network and bandwidth costs are excluded from the approximate cost.

Azure server resources

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Want to get a cost estimate?

You can use the Azure pricing calculator to approximate the costs incurred by the cloud provider. These appear as "passed-through costs" on your invoice. See our billing example below.

Storage

The storage costs that can be passed-through on each infrastructure invoice can include the costs incurred on the cloud provider for the following services:

• The Docker backup system
• Object storage

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Storage costs will increase over time

Due to the nature of the Docker backup system on MedStack Control, which captures data snapshots every hour and retains them within the backup system's lifecycle rules, it is expected to see the storage costs increase each month with active development and use of applications.

Storage costs are composed of:

• Operations on the object store (like read, create/list, write, etc.)
• Data volume (when retrieving and writing data)

Third-party resources

Active security layer

MedStack Control continuously monitors for and responds to threats and system vulnerabilities, as well as patches and maintains the operation of the systems the application layer runs atop.

The active security layer cost is 20% of the passed-through cost and is billed each infrastructure period.

Example

Let's say you signed up for an annual Startup subscription to MedStack Control on July 4, 2020. Here is what the first two invoices could look like:

Invoice: July 4, 2020

Invoice: August 4, 2020

The following month's invoice on August 4, 2020.

Invoice: July 4, 2021

The following year's invoice on July 4, 2021, the annual subscription will automatically be billed for another year of service and the previous month's usage of cloud resources that are passed-through and the active security layer are also included in the invoice.

In this example, the user spun up a managed PostgreSQL database server as well, which you can see as a new line item in the invoice.

Invoice: August 4, 2021

And the following monthly invoice would have a similar structure as expected.