The End of Seat-Based Pricing: Transparent Billing for Modern Workflows

In the world of cloud infrastructure, paying for “seats” feels outdated. When you deploy a serverless application, you don’t pay a monthly fee just to have the account open — you pay for the resources you provision and the milliseconds your code executes.

Why should your workflow engine be any different?

At mQuark, we believe that pricing should align with value. Today, we are excited to announce the official pricing model for Actionful: a transparent, usage-based architecture designed for developers who demand efficiency.

It is simple: No platform access fees. No per-seat costs. You only pay for the endpoints you keep active and the workloads you execute.

The Philosophy: Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Actionful runs on modern, high-performance cloud infrastructure. We’ve designed our billing engine to pass that architectural efficiency directly to you.

Instead of charging you a flat rate for “access” to the platform, we charge based on granular consumption. Whether you are running a simple cron job or a complex state machine with custom code, our Usage-Based Billing ensures your costs scale linearly with your traffic.

The Tiers: From Prototype to Production

We have simplified our offering into three clear paths. We’ve removed artificial barriers; there is no “Developer Tax” to unlock features.

1. Sandbox (Free Forever)

Best for: Prototyping, Learning, and Demos.

We know that developers hate hitting a “Credit Card Required” wall just to test an API. The Sandbox is our commitment to Product-Led Growth.

Cost: $0.00 / month.
Requirement: No credit card required. Simply register and build.
Limits: Rate-limited to prevent abuse, running on a shared resource pool.
Goal: Build your proof-of-concept completely risk-free.

2. Standard (Production)

Best for: Startups, Internal Tools, and Live Applications.

This is the core of Actionful. When you are ready to remove the rate limits, simply add a payment method.

Base Platform Fee: $0.00 / month.
Billing: Pay-As-You-Go (see metrics below).
Features: Unlimited seats, full concurrency, priority compute pool, and longer log retention.

3. Enterprise

Best for: Mission-Critical Workloads.

For organizations that need contractual guarantees.

Includes: Everything in Standard + Custom Base Fee.
Extras: 99.9% Uptime SLA, enhanced resource isolation, and volume discounts on usage rates.

Deep Dive: The 5 Metrics of Actionful

Transparency is vital. We don’t bundle costs into opaque “credits” — we track five specific metrics so you can optimize your architecture.

1. Endpoint Provisioning (Endpoint-Days)

To ensure optimal performance and discourage “zombie” resources, we charge a nominal fee for every active Endpoint you maintain. This covers the reserved capacity for your specific API hooks.

Note: If you delete an endpoint, you stop paying for it immediately.

2. API Calls (Triggers)

This measures the ingress traffic — the number of times your defined Endpoints are hit to trigger a workflow.

3. External Actions (HTTP Calls)

When your workflow reaches out to the world — sending a Slack message, calling a Webhook, or triggering an email via SendGrid — we bill per HTTP request initiated by the engine.

4. Function Invocations

Actionful allows you to inject custom logic via User Functions. We track the number of times these custom functions are invoked within your workflows.

5. Functions Memory Time (GB-Seconds)

For your custom User Functions, we measure the “heavy lifting” of the compute resources.

What it is: The duration your custom code runs multiplied by the memory allocated to it.
Why we track it: Your custom functions are deployed as real, isolated cloud resources behind the scenes. This metric ensures you pay for the exact compute power your logic consumes.

No Ghost Costs

We have engineered Actionful to respect your budget by preventing “Ghost Compute” — the hidden killer of usage-based bills.

In many systems, if an external API hangs, you pay for the compute time while your workflow waits. Actionful enforces strict timeout logic on external requests. If an external API becomes unresponsive, we cut the connection automatically. You don’t pay for compute duration while waiting for a timeout.