How LoadBolt billing works, in plain English. No “contact sales” nonsense.
VU-minutes = virtual users × duration in minutes. It's the single unit that determines how much a test run consumes.
Some concrete examples:
| Plan | Price | Max VUs | Max duration | Runs | VU-min included |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 50 | 5 min | 5/day | 500/mo |
| Starter | $99/mo | 500 | 30 min | Unlimited | 25,000/mo |
| Pro | $299/mo | 2,000 | 1 hr | Unlimited | 100,000/mo |
| Scale | $599/mo | 3,000 | 1 hr | Unlimited | 300,000/mo |
Before you hit “Run,” you can calculate exactly how many VU-minutes a test will consume: multiply VUs by duration in minutes.
Say you want to run 200 VUs for 15 minutes on a Starter plan. That's 3,000 VU-minutes. The Starter plan includes 25,000 VU-minutes per month, so this single test uses 12% of your monthly allowance. Run it 8 times and you're at 24,000 — still within your plan.
The free plan gives you 500 VU-minutes per month with a hard cap — once you've used them, new runs are blocked until your usage resets. You're also limited to 50 VUs, 5-minute duration, and 5 runs per day. Plenty for kicking the tires.
On paid plans (Starter, Pro, Scale), if you exceed your included VU-minutes, overage is billed at $5 per 1,000 VU-minutes. Overage is calculated incrementally per run — you only pay for the VU-minutes that exceeded your included allowance.
Example: you're on Starter (25,000 VU-minutes included). You've used 24,000 this month. You run a test that consumes 3,000 VU-minutes. The first 1,000 are covered by your plan, and the remaining 2,000 are overage: 2 × $5 = $10 extra that month.
Don't want to accidentally spend too much on overage? Set a budget cap in your org settings. If a new run would push your projected overage past the cap, LoadBolt blocks the run before it starts. You'll see a clear message explaining why.
Budget caps are per-org and can be changed any time. Set it to $0 to completely prevent overage.
Your VU-minute counter resets on your subscription renewal date. If you signed up on March 10, your usage resets on April 10, and so on. Unused VU-minutes don't roll over.