AI Daemons — Pricing FAQ¶
Everything about what an AI Daemon costs, how billing works, and what happens when you run out of tokens.
How much does one day of a daemon cost?¶
Daemons are billed per hour of uptime, in HollowHost tokens. The burn rate depends on the plan:
| Plan | Tokens / hour | Tokens / day (24 h) | Approx. AWS cost / day* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | 150 | 3,600 | ≈ $0.28 |
| Standard | 300 | 7,200 | ≈ $0.56 |
| Pro | 600 | 14,400 | ≈ $1.13 |
* Indicative underlying AWS compute cost (1-year Savings Plan rate, arm64/Graviton, us-east-1). HollowHost token burn is calibrated with a safety margin over this AWS cost; the token rate is the number you are actually billed on.
A daemon only burns tokens while it is running. Stopping it (manually, or automatically when tokens run low) halts the burn — you keep the disk and its state, and resume the same VM on the next start.
Tokens cover compute and model usage
The per-hour rate above is the infrastructure (uptime) burn. LLM usage by the daemon (Bedrock model calls) is metered on top, converted into the same token unit. A chatty daemon talking to a model will burn faster than the uptime-only rate.
What happens when I run out of tokens?¶
HollowHost continuously projects how long your shared tenant token balance will last given the burn rate of all your running daemons:
- Low-balance warning — when the projected time-until-tokens-out drops to 15 minutes or less, an auto-stop banner appears on the daemon, showing the minutes remaining and an Add tokens button.
- Add tokens — top up your balance from the banner (or your account billing page) to keep the daemon running. Adding tokens clears the warning and, if the daemon was stopped by exhaustion, lets you start it again.
- Auto-stop on exhaustion — if the balance reaches zero, StopOnTokenExhaustion automatically stops (not deletes) the daemon. The disk and its state are preserved. Once you add tokens, start the daemon to resume exactly where it left off.
Stop ≠ Delete
Exhaustion stops the daemon, it never deletes it. Your data and configuration survive. You only lose the daemon (and its disk) if you explicitly Delete it.
What's the difference between Hobby, Standard, and Pro?¶
| Hobby | Standard (recommended) | Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute | 0.5 vCPU · 512 MB | 1 vCPU · 1 GB | 2 vCPU · 2 GB |
| Storage | 8 GB SSD | 8 GB SSD | 10 GB SSD |
| Tokens / hour | 150 | 300 | 600 |
| Dashboard | Basic | Complete | Advanced |
| Log retention | 24 h | 7 days | 30 days |
| Monitoring | — | Real-time | Advanced + alerts |
| EBS backups | — | — | ✅ weekly, 90-day retention |
| Support | Community | Email (48 h) | Priority (24 h) |
Automated backups are Pro-only. Every Pro daemon's disk is snapshotted weekly (Sundays 02:00 UTC) and the snapshots are retained for 90 days. Hobby and Standard daemons are not backed up — if you need recoverable disk state, choose Pro.
Can I change plan while a daemon is running?¶
- Upgrade (e.g. Hobby → Pro) — applies live. You move to the larger instance and the new (higher) token rate takes effect immediately.
- Downgrade (e.g. Pro → Standard) — applies at the next billing cycle, so you keep the capacity you're paying for until the period ends. Note that downgrading away from Pro stops future backups; snapshots already taken stay until their 90-day retention expires.
Need more? See the Deploy your first AI Daemon guide or the general HollowHost FAQ.