Look back at the last few posts and you’ll spot the gap. We moved billing onto captured volume, split the product into Basic, Team and Enterprise, and opened three ways to try Spider without talking to anyone. Every one of them ended at the free tier. The moment you actually wanted to pay for TEAM or ENTERPRISE, you were back to sending us an email.

That last step is now self-serve too, along with everything that comes after it: renewals, growing or shrinking your pool, and stopping.

Upgrade without a sales call

If you already run a free BASIC licence, the licence page now offers “Upgrade to a paid plan”. You estimate your annual capture volume in terabytes, pick TEAM or ENTERPRISE, choose how you want to pay, and commit for a year. The same pool estimator that’s been on the Pricing page all along computes the number, and it’s the same math the backend uses to write your invoice - no gap between the quote and the bill.

Annual commitments start at €1,000 on TEAM and €3,000 on ENTERPRISE. Those are floors, not entry prices: if your volume prices out below them, you pay the floor and keep the headroom. Above 2,500 TB a year the ladder stops being self-serve and we’d rather build you something properly, so get in touch instead.

You keep your licence, your credentials and your install through the upgrade. Nothing gets reissued.

Pay by card, or by transfer

Card payment runs through Stripe’s hosted checkout, for any amount. From €5,000 up, bank transfer is offered alongside it - we’d rather not put card fees on a €20,000 invoice, and neither would you. The IBAN and the payment reference are on the invoice itself; we confirm it on our side once it lands.

Either way the outcome is identical: your plan activates when the money arrives, and the paid tier lights up across your licences within moments. Your billing details - legal address, country, and an EU VAT number if you have one - are collected once, on a short form before checkout, and drive the VAT treatment on every invoice afterwards.

Yearly or monthly

Two cadences.

Yearly pays the committed amount once, at the start of the period, on one invoice.

Monthly splits it into twelve instalments at a 10% financing fee - commit / 12 × 1.10. Worth being plain about what that is: it’s the cost of us financing the year for you, not a card-processing surcharge, and it applies to the base commitment only. If you ever go over your pool, that overage is billed at the plain rate with no fee on top.

Monthly payers can save a card once and let each instalment collect itself. If a charge is declined we retry a couple of times over the following days and tell you before anything changes; you can switch automatic payment back off whenever you like.

Renewal is automatic and unsurprising: the renewal invoice is issued about a month before your period ends, so you see the number before the date, and paying it rolls you into the next year on the same terms.

A lapse degrades, it never bricks

This one is deliberate, and it’s the part I’d most want to know before committing to a year.

If invoices go unpaid, your licence falls back to free BASIC. It does not expire, it does not get revoked, and your Spider install keeps running - on your own infrastructure, on your own data, which never moves. You lose the paid tier’s features until the outstanding invoice is settled, and the moment it is, the paid tier comes back and the clock moves forward again.

We’re not in a position to hold your observability hostage over an unpaid invoice, and we didn’t want to build a system that could.

One pool, as many licences as you run

Plenty of teams want prod and R&D on separate credentials - separate licences, separate agents, no chance of one polluting the other. That used to be impossible to arrange yourself: the self-serve path allowed exactly one licence per organisation.

Now you can create as many licences as you need, name them, and have all of them meter into the one shared annual pool your organisation committed to. There’s no per-licence fee and no per-seat fee. The commitment belongs to the organisation; the licences just draw from it.

Knowing where you stand

A commitment you can’t see the bottom of isn’t much of a commitment. The subscription card on your licence page carries a volume used this period bar - terabytes consumed against terabytes committed, straight from the same figures the billing engine meters. The usage and cost screens break it down further.

You also get an email when consumption crosses 80% of your pool, and again at 100%, so a busy quarter doesn’t quietly turn into an overage line you find out about on an invoice.

Two things about how overage works, both worth knowing up front:

  • It only ever fires once you’ve exhausted the whole year’s pool. A heavy January against a quiet spring costs you nothing extra - we don’t slice your pool into monthly allowances and charge you for spikes.
  • Unused volume is forfeited at the end of the period, not carried forward or refunded. That’s the trade for the pool being forgiving about when you use it.

Growing, shrinking, stopping

Committing for a year shouldn’t mean being stuck with a number you picked in August.

Growing. Ask for a bigger pool mid-period and you get one uplift invoice, prorated across the months you have left. Pay it and the full new annual pool is yours immediately - the whole year’s worth, not the remainder. If you pay monthly, the remaining instalments reprice in the same move. Nothing changes until the uplift is paid, so an increase you think better of costs you nothing.

Shrinking. A decrease takes effect at your next renewal. You keep the pool you’ve already paid for until then - we’re not going to shrink capacity you funded.

Stopping. Cancel and your subscription runs to the end of the current period, then closes. No refunds on time already paid for, and any final reconciliation still settles, but nothing renews. Change your mind before the end date and one click resumes it as though nothing happened.

Who can spend money

Not everyone invited to run Spider should be able to commit the company to a year of it.

Organisations now have contract owners - the people who own the commercial relationship. Only they can subscribe, resize the pool, cancel, edit the billing profile, attach a card, or pay an invoice. Every other member of the organisation keeps full read access to invoices, invoice PDFs and pool usage, because knowing what the company is spending isn’t a privilege.

Owners are managed on your organisation page, and you can appoint more than one - which you probably should, so a holiday doesn’t block a renewal.

Or let us do it

Self-serve is the default, not the only door. If you’d rather we set it up, our sales team can prepare a plan for your organisation and it shows up in your Portal ready to review and pay, with the same tracker, the same invoices and the same controls afterwards.

All of the above is live today, on real money, for TEAM and ENTERPRISE. Estimate your pool to see the number, or go straight to subscribing if you already know it. And if something in here doesn’t fit how your organisation buys software, tell us - we reply fast.

Cheers, Thibaut