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# Metering and holds

Last updated 2 November 2026

> Machines are not open yet. These pages describe Machines as they will open; until then, a create answers [`region_not_offered`](https://tonbo.dev/docs/machines/troubleshooting/manage.md#region_not_offered) (422), “Machines are not offered in any region yet.”

Reconcile a charge with what your Machine did: what the host measures while it is awake, and how ten-minute holds turn that into a charge.

## What is measured

The host samples each awake Machine every 5 s: the CPU time of its virtual machine’s [cgroup](https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.html) (`cpu.stat`), the memory the virtual machine has touched (`memory.stat`), and the blocks its scratch drive has allocated. The guest cannot change any of them.

## Holds

Before each slice of up to 10 minutes starts, Billing reserves the shape’s full price for it. When the slice ends, it charges the measured use, capped at the shape’s full use over the slice, each of CPU, memory and scratch disk rounded up to the micro-dollar once, and releases the rest. Time that was not measured is never charged.

## Volume storage

A sleeping Machine is charged no compute, and Tonbo keeps no snapshot of it. A Volume’s blocks are stored in the region’s chunk store, and the chunk store’s meter bills each Volume by its live bytes (the compressed chunks its latest state references), at the stored-byte price, $0.05 / GiB × month, outside the holds. The Volume’s ledger is a stream, and its writes are billed as Streams usage.

## One slice, worked

| Shape | CPU | Memory | Scratch disk | Charged |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `s-2` | 312 vCPU-seconds | 900 GiB-seconds | 1,200 GiB-seconds | $0.008937 |

The prices are on [Pricing](https://tonbo.dev/docs/machines/pricing.md).