Billing and Payments for Your Hosted Space

Part of our guide to running an online community you actually own.

If you pay for a hosted relay, billing lives on the hosting side, not in Flotilla. The details below apply to Coracle Hosting; the panel has its own documentation, but here’s what’s worth knowing before you rely on a paid space. If you haven’t set one up yet, start with Hosting Your Space with Coracle.

How you pay

Two payment methods are supported, and you can use either or both with autopay:

• Lightning — connect a wallet with a Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) URL, and new invoices are paid automatically from it.
• Card — add a card through Stripe, which handles the card details.

When an invoice comes due, it’s collected in order of least friction: your Lightning wallet first, then a saved card, then a manual pay link — sent to you as an encrypted direct message if both automatic methods are missing or fail.

Billing cycle and proration

Billing runs in monthly cycles anchored to your first billable activity, not the calendar month. Within a cycle, charges are prorated: creating a paid relay mid-month only charges for the remaining days, changing plans charges or credits the difference, and deactivating a relay credits the unused remainder. Credits net against charges, so a small balance can simply roll forward to offset a future invoice.

If you don’t pay

An open invoice has a 7-day grace period. If it’s still unpaid when that window closes, your relays are paused — the same effect as deactivating them yourself, with your data, settings, and members all preserved — and the unpaid invoice is voided and forgiven rather than carried forward as debt. Reactivating later is a clean slate, with no old invoices to settle first. The worst case for a missed payment is a pause you can reverse, not an escalating bill.