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

# What it costs to run

> What Google bills you for running the hub in your own project, and what changes that number.

The hub runs in your Google Cloud project, so Google bills you directly and we
are not in the middle of it. For a hub one person uses, that bill is somewhere
between nothing and about a dollar a month.

With one or two Google accounts connected, it is usually **nothing at all**.
Everything the hub needs at that size sits inside Google's free allowances.

Past that it climbs slowly, by a few cents per additional account per month.
Ten accounts still comes to well under a dollar. There is no point at which
this becomes a number worth watching.

## What moves it, and what does not

**Connected accounts move it.** The cost is per account, and it applies
whether that account is busy or has sat untouched since you added it. An idle
account you no longer use still counts, so removing accounts you have finished
with is the only lever that actually does anything.

**Use does not move it.** A hub asked for something ten times a month and a
hub asked ten thousand times cost about the same, given the same accounts.
Nothing here is billed per request.

That surprises people, so it is worth being plain: you cannot run this bill up
by using it. Heavy use can even shave a little off, because a hub that is
already awake does less waking up.

## Cloud Run is free at this size

The hub sits at zero when nobody is using it and starts when something asks it
for something. Google's monthly free allowance covers two million requests and
a great deal of running time, which a hub for one person or one team will not
come close to spending. A busy single deployment measured against that
allowance uses a few percent of it.

So Cloud Run is not the part of the bill you are looking at. It is free, and
it stays free.

## Things worth knowing

**Billing has to be linked before you can install.** The project needs a
billing account attached even though the bill starts near zero, because Cloud
Run will not deploy without one.

**Stopping the hub stops the cost.** The **Stop hub** button deletes the
service from your project. Read
[what else that does](/quickstart#stopping-the-hub) first, because it is not a
pause.

**If your bill looks higher than this page suggests,** the usual cause is
credentials that were replaced without clearing out the old ones. Each
leftover set goes on costing its few cents a month until it is removed.

## Next

* [Setting up](/quickstart)
* [Troubleshooting](/troubleshooting)