The Research Platform is funded directly by your project, with budgets managed by your Project Admin via the RPAdmin console.
- Pay only for what you use: You are charged exclusively for machine runtime and storage.
- Watch your budget: There are currently no automatic shut-offs when funds run low, so it is your responsibility to track your spending.
Funding a Project on the Research Platform
Compute Costs
You only pay for active compute time. Everything on the platform runs in a "container" (a running copy of your software). If a container is running, you pay for it. This includes
| Warning |
|---|
Draft for review. This page is under review before the Operational Readiness Review. Panels marked as open questions are still waiting for an answer. Send corrections to the Research Platform team. |
| Info |
|---|
Read time: 4 minutes. Short version: your project pays with its own funding. You pay for the time your machines run, and for the storage you use. Nothing else. Nothing stops you automatically yet — watch your budget. |
Who pays
The project pays, from its own funding. The Research Platform does not give you a separate pot of money. Your project brings its funding, and its members spend against it.
The project admin shares that money out across the team. See RPAdmin — the admin console.
What you pay for
Compute — you pay for running time only
All work on the platform runs in containers. (A container is a packaged, running copy of your workspace software.) You pay for the time a container is running. Nothing more.
This covers:
| What you start | You pay while… |
|---|---|
| Your notebook workspace | the notebook is running |
| A Dask cluster (many machines for one job) | the cluster is up |
| A background job (a notebook that runs on its own) | the job is running |
How to Control Compute Costs
When the you stop a container stops, the charge stops. So: stop , the charges stop. The single most important thing you can do to save money is to turn things off when you aren't using them.
- Stop your notebook when you finish for the day.
- Shut down
...
- your Dask cluster as soon as the job
...
- completes.
Storage Costs
You only
Storage — you pay for what you use
You pay for the storage space you actually hold in three placesare actively using across these three areas:
| Storage | What it is |
|---|---|
| EFS | The shared filesystem for your project |
| EBS | Your own private workspace disk |
| S3 | Cloud object storage for large data |
One important exception: if the Important Exception: If you connect to S3 storage that sits in a remote AWS account — (like your institution's account , or a specific mission's account — ), the Research Platform does not charge you for it. That account's owner The owner of that remote account pays for itthat storage, the same as beforejust as they normally would.
Platform
...
There is no platform fee and no support fee today. The team is evaluating whether to add one. This page will say so if that changes.
Free trial
...
Fees and Free Trials
- Platform/Support Fees: None today. We will update this page if a fee is introduced in the future.
- Free Trial: We offer a small free allocation for
...
- new
...
- projects so you can try the platform.
...
- Please ask the Science Cloud support team for the current
...
- trial amount when you email them.
What
...
Happens When the Money Runs Out?
Important: Today, Today the platform does not enforce a hard stop you. Budgets are tracked and shown, but a workspace still starts when the money is spent. So watch the numbers.
What the platform does do today:
. A workspace will still start even if your funds are depleted, meaning your project can accidentally overspend. You must actively watch your numbers.
How budget tracking works today:
- Platform admins load A platform admin sets the project's total budget , once the Science Cloud has received receives the funds.
- Your project admin then shares Project Admin divides that total out, as setting a specific spending limit for each team member.
- The platform blocks giving out more system prevents the Project Admin from promising more money than the project actually holds. A project admin cannot promise money the project does not have.
- Individual members can see Every member sees their own usage and what is left, remaining budget directly inside JupyterLab.
- A project admin sees the whole project's spend against budget in RPAdminProject Admins can see the entire team's spending in the RPAdmin console.
What is coming
...
A hard stop at launch is planned work, not live yet:
...
next (Hard Stops):
We are currently building strict budget controls. Once launched, the system will automatically block new workspaces from starting when a project's funds are used up
...
. Project admins will also be able to decide if individuals who hit their personal limits are blocked, or if they can continue spending from the general project pool.
Until this feature goes live, budget control relies on active monitoring and team communication, not system blocks.
Project Funding and RPAdmin Budget Management
Funding and budget management in RPAdmin operate under the following principles:
- Project Accounts: Funding is routed to a dedicated project account, functioning similarly to an AWS linked account.
- Cost Representation: Figures displayed in the RPAdmin dashboard represent AWS service costs, not actual NASA costs.
- Budget Limits: Principal Investigators (PIs) are responsible for setting budgets and spending limits within RPAdmin (similar to AWS Cost Explorer). These limits are used for tracking and should be based on available balance reported by the project report from FinOps.
- Reporting: Until a dedicated self-service dashboard is fully available, projects will receive monthly cost and spending reports to track their allocations and usage.
How to Keep Your Costs Down
- Turn off what you aren't using: Stop your notebooks
Until that ships, budget control is by watching and talking, not by the system saying no.
How the money gets into the system
| Note |
|---|
OPEN — Danl to answer. The question for him is: "How does funding actually reach a project's budget in RPAdmin? Who enters the dollar amount, and what is it based on — a WBS number, a purchase, a funds transfer, or something else? What paperwork does a project admin need before the number can be entered, and how does the project admin add more money later?" Do not publish this section until Danl answers. |
How to keep your cost down
- Stop what you are not using. Notebooks, Dask clusters, and background jobs the moment you finish with them.
- Pick the right machine size: Choose the smallest size . Do not take that fits your work. Don't spin up a 64 GB machine for a small jobtask.
- Watch your own number. Your Monitor your budget: Keep a close eye on your personal usage and remaining budget are shown in balance, which are always visible inside JupyterLab.
- Clean up old storage. Old files keep costing money every month: Delete unnecessary files, models, and data. Stored data incurs a continuous monthly charge.
- Use a background job jobs for long runs. You do not : You don't need to keep an interactive session aliveopen just to wait for a long script to finish. Send it to the background so you aren't paying for an active workspace while you wait.