Why we bill per instance, not per seat
Most hosted git platforms charge per seat. Add a collaborator, pay more. We decided early that Fjord would charge per instance instead, and that the people inside an instance would never be metered.
Per-seat pricing taxes collaboration
The whole point of a forge is to get more people working in the same place. A per-seat meter works directly against that: every new contributor is a line item, so teams ration access, share logins, and leave drive-by contributors locked out. The pricing model ends up shaping the engineering culture, and not for the better.
The instance is the natural unit
A Fjord instance has a real, predictable cost: storage, runner capacity, the backup pipeline, and support. That maps cleanly onto tiers, and it means the bill doesn’t move just because you added a teammate. You provision the instance you need, and you grow the team inside it for free.
How that shows up: starter, team, and pro
Concretely, the tiers change the forge you get, not the number of people in it:
- Starter, $19/mo. A single-user forge for public repositories, on the shared runner pool, with community support.
- Team, $49/mo. Public and private repositories, team-owned with no per-seat billing; nightly encrypted backups; OIDC single sign-on and custom domains; email support (about two business days).
- Pro, $149/mo. Everything in Team, with more storage, room for more dedicated runner add-ons, and priority stewardship (about one business day).
Every plan runs CI on the shared runner pool. A dedicated runner is an add-on rather than something a tier includes: Team can attach one, Pro up to three, and each is a recurring charge on top of the plan price. That is still per-instance billing (you are buying a machine attached to a forge, not a seat), but it is a line of its own on the invoice, so a Team forge with a dedicated runner bills more than $49.
What moves you between tiers is repository visibility, how much CI and storage you run, backups, and support speed, not how many collaborators you have. On the team-owned tiers, adding people to the instance never changes the bill.
“Team” is a size, not a seat count
Because one of the tiers is called team, it is worth being blunt: that is the name of an instance tier, not a per-head charge. The team tier is team-owned with no per-seat billing: it does not meter collaborators, and moving to it does not turn on per-seat pricing. It adds private repositories, backups, SSO, custom domains, and the option to attach a dedicated runner to the same per-instance model; nothing about the people count changes.
See the pricing page for the current, authoritative rate card, exactly what each tier includes, and what the dedicated runner add-on costs.