Why we bill per instance, not per seat
Most hosted git platforms charge per seat. Add a collaborator, pay more. We decided early that Fjord would charge per instance instead, and that the people inside an instance would never be metered.
Per-seat pricing taxes collaboration
The whole point of a forge is to get more people working in the same place. A per-seat meter works directly against that: every new contributor is a line item, so teams ration access, share logins, and leave drive-by contributors locked out. The pricing model ends up shaping the engineering culture, and not for the better.
The instance is the natural unit
A Fjord instance has a real, predictable cost: storage, runner capacity, the backup pipeline, and support. That maps cleanly onto tiers, and it means the bill doesn’t move just because you added a teammate. You provision the instance you need, and you grow the team inside it.
How that shows up: starter, team, and pro
Concretely, the tiers change the forge you get, not the number of people in it:
- Starter, $19/mo. A single-user forge for public repositories, on the shared runner pool, with community support.
- Team, $49/mo. Public and private repositories, team-owned with no per-seat billing; nightly encrypted backups; OIDC single sign-on and custom domains; email support (about two business days).
- Pro, $149/mo. Everything in Team, with more storage, room for more dedicated runner add-ons, and priority stewardship (about one business day).
Every plan runs CI on the shared runner pool. A dedicated runner is an add-on rather than something a tier includes: Team can attach one, Pro up to three, and each is a recurring charge on top of the plan price. That is still per-instance billing (you are buying a machine attached to a forge, not a seat), but it is a line of its own on the invoice, so a Team forge with a dedicated runner bills more than $49.
What moves you between tiers is repository visibility, how much CI and storage you run, backups, and support speed, not how many collaborators you have. On the team-owned tiers, adding people to the instance never changes the bill.
“Team” is a size, not a seat count
Because one of the tiers is called team, it is worth being blunt: that is the name of an instance tier, not a per-head charge. The team tier is team-owned with no per-seat billing: it does not meter collaborators, and moving to it does not turn on per-seat pricing. It adds private repositories, backups, SSO, custom domains, and the option to attach a dedicated runner to the same per-instance model; nothing about the people count changes.
The honest caveat is starter. It is deliberately a single-user forge, so it is the one tier where adding a collaborator means moving up rather than staying put. That is a capability the tier does not include, not a meter running in the background, and it is the only place the distinction matters. On team and pro, collaborators are uncapped and never counted.
See the pricing page for the current, authoritative rate card, exactly what each tier includes, and what the dedicated runner add-on costs.