> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.alfiz.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Alfiz Cloud Metering and Caps: What Is Billed and What Never Is

> The billed dimensions, hard caps per dimension, and why check volume is not among them and will not become one.

Alfiz Cloud bills for the work it performs. The dimensions are few, they are all visible over the API, and every one of them carries a hard cap you control. What is not on the list matters more than what is: your request path does not appear here, because Alfiz Cloud is not on it.

## The dimensions

| Dimension                | Kind      | What moves it                                                                                                 |
| ------------------------ | --------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Admin seats              | Standing  | Authenticated Dashboard sessions. Billing starts at first sign-in rather than at invite.                      |
| Linked applications      | Standing  | Applications registered and linked. Included at no cost, because the seat is the product and the link is not. |
| Federated applications   | Standing  | Member applications under the hosted org root.                                                                |
| Provisioned connectors   | Standing  | Operating reconcilers for an external system, one per connector.                                              |
| Retained audit events    | Counted   | Events ingested into opt-in hosted retention.                                                                 |
| Catalog publishes        | Guardrail | Publishes to the registry.                                                                                    |
| Org-root read-model sync | Guardrail | Snapshot pushes keeping a member application's read model current.                                            |

**Standing** dimensions bill for what exists, such as a seat or an application, at a monthly rate. **Counted** dimensions bill for what happened, meaning events ingested. **Guardrail** dimensions are metered but carry generous included volumes; they exist to keep pathological automation visible, not to price ordinary use.

## Alfiz is never in your request path

Every `can()` runs in-process against your own database. Alfiz Cloud is not a dependency of your application: it cannot add latency to a check, cannot throttle one, and cannot fail in a way that stops one. That holds in every topology, including full federation, because the relay carries administrative traffic only, and the audit stream is opt-in and never sits between a request and its answer.

Pricing follows from it. Alfiz Cloud bills for the work it performs, being the dimensions above, and **check volume is not a billing dimension and will not become one.**

<Note>
  [Permission metrics](/enforcement/metrics) are a different feature with a confusingly similar name. Metering counts work Alfiz Cloud performed; metrics count checks *your application* performed. Metrics are stored by the application that produced them, in its own database. The hosted dashboard can *read* them for your own administrators, the same relayed read as every other admin surface, but Alfiz Cloud stores no copy and never bills on them.
</Note>

## Reading your meters

Every meter is readable over the API, exactly as the Dashboard renders it, with the same numbers and the same server function:

```text theme={null}
GET /api/v1/orgs/{org}/billing/usage
```

## Hard caps

Every dimension carries a hard cap, settable per dimension:

```text theme={null}
PUT /api/v1/orgs/{org}/billing/caps/{dimension}
```

Crossing a cap degrades hosted convenience and nothing else: retention ingest pauses, relay cadence slows. It never degrades any locally-running capability: checks, grants, enforcement, and your own admin surfaces continue untouched, because none of them run on Alfiz Cloud in the first place.

## Prices

The numbers live with the tiers they belong to:

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Linked pricing" icon="link" href="/growth/linked#pricing">
    Admin seats and opt-in audit retention. The linked application itself is free.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Federation pricing" icon="share-nodes" href="/growth/federated#pricing">
    The federation base, member applications, provisioned connectors, and carried-over seats.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>