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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://hercules.app/docs/llms.txt

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Hercules Cloud is our full-stack hosting infrastructure. It comes with a database, backend functions, auth, AI, email, and more. It’s built into every Hercules app and starts working immediately. It includes an incredibly generous free tier, 99% of our paid customers don’t pay a cent for Hercules Cloud! Cloud credits (your Cloud Balance) cover any usage beyond your plan’s included limits and any AI inference triggered by your live app through the Hercules AI Gateway. To see your usage and manage your cloud credits, go to Settings → Billing → Hercules Cloud.
Cloud Usage dashboard with balance, auto-billing, and resource usage table

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How are cloud credits different from AI credits?

  • AI credits are included with your subscription and are used while building your app (generating, editing, debugging with the Hercules AI Agent). See AI Credits.
  • Cloud credits are used once your app is running. They cover hosting overages and any AI inference triggered by your live app through the Hercules AI Gateway.
Because they are separate, your Cloud Balance can go negative even if you still have AI credits remaining.

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How much does Hercules Cloud cost?

Your Hercules subscription plan includes a very generous amount of free usage each month. Any additional usage beyond that is charged at a low pay-as-you-go rate.
MetricFreeProBusiness
200k/month5M/month
Then 2.50 / million		5M/month
Then 2.50 / million
1 GB/month100 GB/month
Then 0.035 / GB-month		100 GB/month
Then 0.035 / GB-month
500 MB/month25 GB/month
Then 0.27 / GB-month		25 GB/month
Then 0.27 / GB-month
1 GB/month25 GB/month
Then 0.27 / GB		25 GB/month
Then 0.27 / GB
100 MB/month1 GB/month
Then 0.70 / GB-month		1 GB/month
Then 0.70 / GB-month
500 MB/month5 GB/month
Then 0.14 / 1,000 query-GBs		5 GB/month
Then 0.14 / 1,000 query-GBs
1 GB/month50 GB/month
Then 0.16 / GB		50 GB/month
Then 0.16 / GB
2 GB-hr/month25 GB-hr/month
Then 0.42 / GB-hr		25 GB-hr/month
Then 0.42 / GB-hr
2 GB-hr/month25 GB-hr/month
Then 0.21 / GB-hr		25 GB-hr/month
Then 0.21 / GB-hr
Pay as you goPay as you goPay as you go
Need custom limits? Contact us for Enterprise pricing.

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How far will the included limits get me?

The included limits will allow you to scale very far. 99% of our paid users don’t pay a cent for Hercules Cloud. Hercules has customers building large scale internal tools for their business, mobile apps that go viral, and AI video editor infrastructure. These users are all covered by Hercules’s generous limits. If you are concerned, please reach out to Hercules support who can give you guidance.

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How do I analyze my usage?

Go to Settings → Billing → Hercules Cloud to see your usage. You can filter your usage by feature, date range, and app.
Hercules Cloud usage dashboard showing resource breakdown by app with a bar chart for Function Calls

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How do I add to my cloud credit balance?

There are two ways to add to your cloud credit balance: Auto top-ups Use auto top-ups to automatically increase your cloud credit balance when your balance is low.
  1. Go to Settings → Billing → Hercules Cloud
  2. Click Configure in the Auto billing card
  3. Set a threshold (the balance at which a top-up triggers) and the amount to add each time.
  4. (Optional) Set alerts to get notified when usage or spend reaches a certain level.
Auto top-ups dialog with fields for balance threshold and top-up amount
Manually
  1. Go to Settings → Billing → Hercules Cloud
  2. Click Add balance
  3. Choose an amount and pay once.
Hercules Cloud balance card showing current balance and Add balance button

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Can Hercules Cloud scale?

Hercules Cloud can scale up and down as much as you need. All Hercules apps are deployed on “serverless” architecture (even your database). This means Hercules apps can scale to millions of users seamlessly and scale down to 0 if not being used.

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How do I reduce my Hercules Cloud usage and spend?

Just ask Hercules!
  1. Go to Settings → Billing → Hercules Cloud to find which 1) apps and 2) resources is billing the most
  2. For each app, go to Backend → the ⋮ icon in the Production deployment → View function usage
  3. Take a screenshot of the functions that are consuming high DB bandwidth / action compute
  4. Go to AI Editor and 1) create a new chat, 2) paste the screenshot, and 3) ask Hercules to research how to reduce the database bandwidth and action compute of these functions as much as possible while still preserving functionality
  5. Confirm you are okay with Hercules going to fix the issues
Here are some more specific instructions you can follow for each resource type
Database bandwidth is the data transferred from and to your database. You can reduce database bandwidth by following these instructions:
  • Reduce the frequency of scheduled tasks
  • Only load the fields you actually use, not entire rows
  • Add pagination to lists so you don’t load thousands of records at once
  • Cache results you fetch repeatedly instead of re-querying each time
  • Add indexes on columns you filter or sort by often
  • Avoid N+1 queries (loading related records one-by-one in a loop)
Ask Hercules to reduce database bandwidth
Audit my app and reduce database bandwidth. Look for unnecessary fields being loaded, missing pagination, repeated queries, missing indexes, and N+1 query patterns. Fix each issue you find without causing any functional changes.
Action compute is the total time your backend functions spend running. You can reduce action compute by following these instructions:
  • Reduce the frequency of scheduled tasks
  • Cache responses from external APIs instead of calling them on every request
  • Batch multiple operations into one instead of running them one-by-one
  • Move filtering and sorting to the database layer rather than in code
  • Avoid doing heavy work inside loops
Ask Hercules to reduce action compute
Audit my app and reduce backend action compute usage. Look for repeated external API calls that could be cached or run less frequently, overly frequent scheduled tasks, unbatched operations, in-memory filtering that could be done with database filtering, and heavy work inside loops. Fix each issue you find.

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Additional FAQ

Hercules Cloud is built on Cloudflare, AWS, and Convex. These are enterprise-grade infrastructure providers with some of the highest reliability, security, scalability in the world.We host thousands of production applications and take reliability seriously. If you ever experience any issues, our support team is available to help resolve them quickly.
We strongly recommend hosting on Hercules Cloud. Hercules apps are optimized for hosting on Hercules Cloud. As we shared above, 99% of our paid customers don’t pay a cent for hosting. That said, you can download your app’s code at any time and self-host it on any provider you choose. Unfortunately, Hercules is unable to provide support for self-hosted deployments.
Hercules will automatically alert you when you have used 50%, 75%, 90%, and 100% of your included monthly limits so you’re never caught off guard.If you go over your limit, Hercules reserves the right to pause your app. To date, we have not paused any user apps when this has happened. Someone from our team will get in contact with you immediately and we do everything we can to keep your app running, however, understandably if your costs are ballooning rapidly and you have not gotten in contact with us we will have temporarily pause your app.To avoid disruptions:
  • Set up auto top-ups so your cloud credit balance refills automatically
  • Contact us before a big launch so we can adjust your limits in advance
  • Contact us if you’re expecting a traffic spike and we’ll make sure you’re covered.
AI credits and Cloud Balance are separate and are used in different parts of Hercules.AI credits are included with your subscription and are used while building your app (generating, editing, debugging).Cloud Balance is used once your app is running. It covers hosting overages and any AI inference triggered by your app through the Hercules AI Gateway.Your subscription includes certain hosting and usage limits. If those limits are exceeded or if your live app makes AI requests, those costs are applied to your Cloud Balance.Because of this, your Cloud Balance can go negative even if you still have AI credits remaining.