Getting started

1. 01Go to aletcloud.com and choose Create an account. Sign up with a phone number or with Google.
2. 02Verify the phone number with the one-time code that arrives by SMS.
3. 03Top up the wallet in ETB through Chapa, which takes telebirr, a bank transfer or a card.
4. 04Open the console. The account can create resources from here on.

The console is the control panel for every product. It creates and manages servers, apps, databases, buckets and domains, shows usage and billing, and issues the access tokens an AI agent needs.

• Every price is in ETB, and usage is deducted from the wallet balance.
• Servers, hosted apps, databases, buckets and Business Email are all charged by the minute. The plan carries a monthly price, the hourly rate comes from that, and the minute rate comes from the hour. A machine that ran for an afternoon costs an afternoon.
• The monthly price is a ceiling rather than a subscription. Nothing costs more than it in a month, and deleting a resource stops the charge at that minute.
• Domains are the exception. They are registered and renewed a year at a time and are charged in full when that happens.
• When your balance is exhausted your services are suspended, not deleted; data is kept while suspended. Topping up brings them back. Deleting a database yourself removes it and its backups.

The prepaid balance is itself the spending limit: there is no credit line and nothing can be charged that was not first put into the wallet. See spending limits and alerts for the warnings that arrive before it runs out.

App hosting includes a free Solo app and managed databases include a free Solo database, one of each per account, neither with an expiry date.

Creating a resource checks the balance first. The test is a day of it: the wallet has to hold enough to run that resource for twenty-four hours before it will be provisioned.

That is a check at creation, not a charge and not a hold. Nothing is set aside, and the minutes are still billed as they pass. It exists so a resource is never created against a balance that cannot keep it alive long enough to be useful.

The wallet is prepaid, and that is the spending limit. Usage is deducted from the balance as it happens; there is no credit line and no invoice arrives later, so an account can never spend more than has been put into it. When the balance reaches zero, services are suspended rather than billed further, and their data is kept.

To cap what a month can cost, cap what goes into the wallet. A balance of 3,000 ETB running 2,400 ETB of resources a month lasts about five weeks and then stops; it cannot run up a bill.

Alerts before it runs out

• Runway warnings are automatic. The platform works out how many hours the balance covers at the current burn rate and sends an SMS and an email at about 48 hours of runway, then again at about 6 hours. Each repeats at most every 12 hours until the wallet is topped up.
• A balance alert is yours to set. In the console, open Billing and enter an amount in ETB under Balance alert. The platform sends one SMS and one email the first time the balance drops to that figure. Topping up, or saving a new amount, arms it again.
• The console dashboard shows the wallet card in red when fewer than 72 hours of runway remain.