Orbit
Orbit Plan Limits
Orbit has three plans, and this page documents exactly what each one includes: projects, environments, build minutes, bandwidth, build machine size, and the features that only appear on the paid tiers. Every plan includes unlimited team seats, commercial use, and a spending cap that stops a runaway bill.
Plans At a Glance
| Launch | Liftoff | Apex | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | US$12.00/mo | US$30.00/mo |
| Projects | 1 | 3 | Unlimited |
| Environments per project | 2 | 4 | 11 |
| Build minutes per month | 200 | 3,000 | 8,000 |
| Bandwidth per month | 50 GB | 1,024 GB | 3,072 GB |
| Concurrent builds | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Build cache | No | Yes | Yes |
| Custom domains | No | Yes | Yes |
| Wildcard SSL | No | Yes | Yes |
| Deployment history | 7 days | 30 days | 90 days |
| Priority builds | No | No | Yes |
| Premium CDN edge | No | No | Yes |
| Webhook events | No | Yes | Yes |
| API access | No | No | Yes |
| Team seats | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Commercial use | Allowed | Allowed | Allowed |
Prices are shown excluding GST. GST is added at checkout for New Zealand billing accounts.
Build Machine Size
Your plan also decides how much machine each build gets, which matters for large projects far more than the raw minute allowance:
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | Disk | Time limit per build |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Launch | 1 | 1 GB | 4 GB | 30 minutes |
| Liftoff | 2 | 2 GB | 8 GB | 30 minutes |
| Apex | 4 | 4 GB | 16 GB | 30 minutes |
A build that exceeds its RAM fails with an Out of memory category on the deployment page; one that fills its disk fails with Build disk full. Both are plan limits, not bugs.
The 30-minute limit is a runaway abort and is the same on every plan. It exists so an infinite loop in a build script cannot consume your whole monthly allowance in one afternoon.
What Counts As a Build Minute
A build minute is one minute of active build time, from the start of the install phase to the point where the artifact is packaged. Time spent queued does not count.
The exact duration of every build is on its deployment detail page, broken down per phase, so you can see where your minutes are going. Orbit, then Usage shows the account total for the month, and each project's Analytics tab shows that project's share along with a projected end-of-month figure based on the days elapsed so far.
Build cache is the single biggest lever on build minutes. On Liftoff and Apex a cache hit removes most of the install phase, which is typically the longest part of a small project's build. If your cache hit rate is low, the project overview flags it and tells you so.
Environments Per Project
Each project has one production environment, and can add a staging environment and branch preview environments. The environment limit is the maximum number of environments a single project can have active at once, production included.
- Launch: 2, so production plus one other, typically one preview at a time.
- Liftoff: 4, so production, staging and two previews.
- Apex: 11, so production plus ten.
Branch previews themselves are not a paid feature: the toggle is available on every plan. What the plan limits is how many can exist simultaneously.
Once a project is at its environment limit, further branches quietly do not get a preview. If a branch you pushed has no preview and the toggle is on, count your active environments first. Setting Preview expiry in Settings to 14 or 30 days keeps this from happening on a busy repository.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is measured across your account for the billing month. Traffic from denial-of-service and other malicious volumetric attacks is never billed: Kapsule absorbs it and does not count it against your allowance.
Overage Rates
Exceeding your build minutes or bandwidth does not cut you off. Usage continues at overage rates:
- Build minutes: US$0.05 per minute beyond your plan's monthly allowance
- Bandwidth: US$0.03 per GB beyond your plan's monthly allowance
Overage is capped by each project's spending cap, which defaults to US$63.16 per month. When the cap is reached, production serving pauses rather than the bill continuing to grow. Full detail, including the alert thresholds and how to resume, is in Spending Caps and Bill-Shock Protection.
Your plan's base subscription fee is separate from the cap. The cap limits overage spend only. Raising the cap raises the maximum you can be charged for overage in a month, so treat it as a deliberate decision rather than a formality when a site is paused.
Deployment History
Orbit keeps your past deployment artifacts so you can roll back to any previous successful deployment without a rebuild. The plan sets the retention window: 7 days on Launch, 30 on Liftoff, 90 on Apex.
Separately, each project has an Artifact retention setting in Settings controlling how many successful artifacts to keep per environment, from 10 to 500, defaulting to 50. Older ones are cleaned up daily. The currently live deployment's artifact is always kept, regardless of either limit.
Artifact retention is what makes instant rollback possible. Lowering it shortens how far back you can roll a bad deploy without waiting for a rebuild. If you deploy several times a day, raise it rather than lower it.
What Only the Paid Plans Have
- Build cache (Liftoff and Apex) makes repeat builds dramatically faster.
- Custom domains and wildcard SSL (Liftoff and Apex). On Launch, projects serve on their
kaps.runaddress only. - Webhook events (Liftoff and Apex) for outbound notifications on deployment events.
- Priority builds, premium CDN edge and API access (Apex only). API access is what powers the tokens at Orbit, then Tokens, for driving deploys from a CI pipeline.
- Three concurrent builds (Apex only). Launch and Liftoff run one build at a time and queue the rest.
The Free Plan
Launch is free permanently. There is no trial period, no expiry and no card required: the plans screen says Forever. No card required.
It includes unlimited team seats and commercial use is allowed, so a single small production site is a legitimate permanent use of it. What you give up is build cache, custom domains and the higher allowances.
Changing Plans
- Click Orbit in the sidebar.
- Click See Plans.
- Pick a plan.
Starting on Launch activates immediately with no checkout. Moving between plans when you already have an Orbit subscription goes through the change-plan flow, which prices the difference for the remainder of your billing period and leaves your other Kapsule subscriptions untouched.
If you are already at your project cap, the Orbit index shows a Plan cap reached pill and a prompt to upgrade rather than silently failing when you click New project.