Pools: Our Newest Primitive

At exe, one of the things we pride ourselves on is developing strong primitives instead of throwing features at the wall. We still believe that the VM is a key primitive in our system. Everything is just a computer and you get to choose how you use it.

We’ve encouraged you all to build VMs, scale them, and run your production stacks on our platform. But we noticed we were missing a primitive for logically grouping VMs. Today, we’re launching pools.

A pool is a collection of VMs that share a set of resources. Before pools, a VM’s resources came directly from your plan. You could scale VMs independently, but you couldn’t define a production or staging stack with its own resources in its own region.

Pools also give you predictable pricing. We don’t want to send you a surprise invoice because one VM had a burst of traffic.

Here’s how pools work:

1. Create a pool in a region, with a specific CPU and memory size.
2. Move existing VMs into the pool, or create new VMs in it.
3. Those VMs now share the pool’s resources.
4. Set up more pools as you need them.

Pricing

Pools come with some plan changes. New customers can start using pools today, and existing customers can migrate to the new plans to get access. There are two new plans to choose from: Personal and Work.

Personal

The Personal plan starts at $15 a month for a 2 vCPU / 4 GB pool that holds up to 50 VMs. You can scale your pool up to 16 vCPUs / 32 GB of memory for $155 a month. Additional disk and bandwidth charges still apply.

We’re also introducing standalone VMs, billed at an hourly rate. Other platforms call these sandbox VMs. Customers have been asking for this for a while, and we wanted to make sure we built the right thing. You manage a standalone VM like any other VM, but you own its lifecycle and decide how to use it. You can think of it as a VM in a pool of 1.

Work

Our previous Teams plan charged per seat. This made sense at first, but customers told us they’d rather pay for compute. So the new Work plan no longer charges for seats.

The Work plan is built around pools. It has a minimum spend of $150 a month, and the first 4 vCPUs / 8 GB of memory are included. On top of that, you can create as many pools as you want, of any size, billed at a predictable rate starting at $0.105/hr per 2 vCPUs. Like the Personal plan, it also includes standalone VMs.

Companies come in all shapes and sizes. If the Work plan doesn’t fit your team, reach out and we’ll work with you to find a better solution.

Pricing changes can be hard, but we believe pools are a strong foundation moving forward. Existing customers can take their time moving over (a year, to be exact). We’re here to help, and we’re excited to see what you build.