Co-founder here. Thanks for asking this - we get this question a lot and have tried our best to address it in the FAQ section of our pricing page (https://porter.run/pricing). Infrastructure provisioned by Porter is constantly managed by Porter so that the end user does not have to worry about the details of maintaining a Kubernetes cluster. In this regard, our pricing structure is identical to traditional platform as a services like Heroku, Render, Fly.io, or Vercel, where the respective PaaS provider is effectively charging a margin on top of their own cloud resources on AWS/GCP. This form of leasing out the PaaS provider's AWS/GCP infrastructure to end users also often results in rapidly increasing costs especially as you start hitting scale on hosted platforms like Heroku.

The value you get from Porter is the same as these platforms: with the clusters plugged into our internal system, our team monitors your infrastructure and owns its reliability so the end user can just focus on the application. Other platforms that also run in the customer's own cloud, such as Red Hat OpenShift, has similar resource based pricing models.

On this note, we offer an option to bring your own Kubernetes cluster and connect Porter to it. In this case, the end user manages their own infrastructure and Porter purely acts as a UI on top of your own Kubernetes cluster. Accordingly, for this use case, pricing is based on the number of user seats instead of resource usage. Many of our customers who use Porter in this capacity often have their own DevOps teams that manage the infrastructure and use Porter purely as a means to simplify deployment for their developers.

It's also worth mentioning that Porter is not meant for small workloads or hobbyists. If your spend on Heroku is less than $300, we actually do not recommend using Porter and have advised many users who were interested in Porter to use platforms like Render and Fly.io. Porter is designed for companies - mostly startups - who actually need to scale their applications and have sufficient budget for their cloud infrastructure.