CloudSpectra VPN Twin

Two plans. Which one are you?

A small relay runs in your own cloud account. Static IP is $5.00 a month and takes that relay's public address onto the machine you are sitting at. Shared VPN is $0.006849 an hour per user and puts a whole team behind it instead. Your cloud provider bills you about $4 to $6 a month for the relay VM, separately from us.

Compare Static IP One address. One machine at a time. Movable. Shared VPN One relay. A whole team behind it.
Price $5.00 / month per address held. Flat, not metered. $0.006849 / hour per user. About $5.00 a month per user if left running -- and nothing at all in a month nobody connects.
Charged at checkout Yes. The first period, prorated. Start partway through a month and you pay only for the days that remain, so the first payment is a small fraction of $5.00 -- $0.44 for the last three days of a month, for instance. Nothing. The plan is billed purely in arrears, so your first charge comes at the end of the month, for the hours actually used.
What you actually get The relay's real public IPv4 and IPv6 are transferred onto the machine you are using. Every port, inbound and outbound. This is not port forwarding and it is not an overlay address handed to a tunnel -- it is the address itself. A shared relay your members sit behind. Traffic leaves with the relay's address (SNAT). No address is moved onto anybody's machine: this mode is for getting out together, not for being reached.
Inbound connections Yes -- the address is yours while you hold it, so whatever reaches it reaches you, on any port. No -- outbound only. Members share one egress address and are not individually reachable on it.
Devices One at a time. Move the address between laptop, workstation and phone in seconds; that is the headline feature. Only one device holds it at any moment. Unlimited per member, all connected at once.
People One. The address is one-to-one with the machine currently holding it. Many. Each member gets their own credential, and the account owner adds them with a single-use invite token.
Billing unit Per address held, per month. Flat, because the address stays reserved for you whether or not a device is attached. Charged pro rata if you start or stop mid-month. Per member, per hour. Any clock hour in which a member is connected counts as a whole hour -- the usual granularity for hourly cloud billing.
A month you do not use it $5.00. The address is still being held for you. $0.00. Nothing connected, nothing billed.
Your cloud provider's bill Separate, and yours. One relay VM, about $4 to $6 a month, charged to you by your provider. Not on our invoice, and not included in the $5.00 above. Separate, and yours. Still one relay VM for the whole team, about $4 to $6 a month, charged to you by your provider. Not on our invoice.
Where the relay runs Both plans: in your own cloud account -- DigitalOcean by default, Vultr and AWS also supported -- created with your own API token. We host nothing and we own no IP address.
Fee and term Both plans: no signup fee, no minimum term, cancel at any time.

Static IP -- $5.00 / month

Per address held. Charged now, prorated for the rest of this month.

Your cloud provider bills you separately for the relay VM, about $4 to $6 a month.

Shared VPN -- $0.006849 / hour

Per user. Nothing is charged at checkout; the first bill is at the end of the month.

Your cloud provider bills you separately for the relay VM, about $4 to $6 a month.

Checkout itself can only show a single short line describing what you picked -- roughly a sentence, with no room for the caveats. That is why the whole comparison lives here, before the click rather than after it.

Still not sure? Read the sentence that sounds like you.

Almost everybody lands cleanly on one side of this.

💻

"I need to be an address."

Take Static IP. It is one person carrying one public address between their own machines.

  • Something has to reach you inbound -- a game host, a server you run at home, SSH, a webhook, a device that only trusts one address.
  • An account, a bank or an employer expects to see you coming from the same address every time.
  • You move between a laptop, a workstation and a phone and want the address to follow you rather than stay pinned to one box.
  • You are one person. One device holds the address at a time, and moving it is the point.
👥

"We all need to come from one place."

Take Shared VPN. It is a team sharing one relay, billed per member for the hours they are actually connected.

  • Several people need to reach something that only allows one source address.
  • Everybody should get out from the same place, but nobody needs to be reached inbound.
  • People come and go: you want to hand out a single-use invite token and revoke a credential later.
  • Usage is bursty. A member who connects for a few hours a week costs a few cents, and a quiet month costs nothing.
💳 What it costs, with the awkward numbers left in

Two prices, both real, neither rounded in our favour -- and then the bill that is not ours at all.

Static IP

Flat. Per address held.

Charged at checkoutthe first period, prorated
Rate$5.00 / month
Starting 3 days before month endabout $0.44
A full month, device attached or not$5.00
12 months, one address$60.00
Second address held at the same time+$5.00 / month
Shared VPN

Hourly. Per member.

Charged at checkout$0.00
Rate$0.006849 / hour, per user
One user, connected all of a 31-day month$5.10
One user, connected all of a 28-day month$4.60
12 months, one user, always connectedabout $60.00
A month nobody connects$0.00
Why we do not promise a $5.00 ceiling. Because in a 31-day month there is not one. An hourly rate of $0.006849 works out to exactly $5.00 across an average month of 730 hours, so a long month comes to a few cents over and a February comes in under. Across a full year they cancel out: a unit left running for twelve months costs about $60.00, the same as twelve flat $5.00 months.
An hour is a whole hour on Shared VPN. Any clock hour in which a member is connected is billed as a full hour for that member. Connect at 10:58 and disconnect at 11:02 and you have touched two clock hours, so that member costs about $0.014. That is the standard granularity for hourly cloud billing, and it is better read here than discovered on an invoice.
The whole bill, both halves

A worked example: one public address, one person, running continuously for a full calendar month.

Cloud Spectra subscription -- Static IP, one address held $5.00
Your cloud provider, for the relay VM -- their smallest instance, charged to your card by them, on a bill we never see about $4 to $6
Set-up or signup fee$0.00
Minimum termnone
Total, across both bills about $9 to $11 a month

For a team on Shared VPN the shape is the same, but the relay is shared: one VM for everybody at about $4 to $6 a month, plus about $5.00 a month for each member who leaves it running. Five people is roughly $25 a month to us and still just the one machine on your provider's bill.

The cloud bill is yours, and it is the part people are surprised by. The relay is created in your account with your API token, and it stays yours. Your provider charges you for it directly, and Cloud Spectra never sees that token, that invoice or that card. Two consequences worth knowing before you buy. First, the machine keeps costing you money until you destroy it -- cancelling with us does not stop it, so when you are finished with a relay, destroy it in your own provider console as well as cancelling here. Second, if you push enough traffic to exceed your provider's included transfer allowance, the overage lands on their bill, not ours. DigitalOcean and Vultr sit at the low end of the $4 to $6 range; on AWS, budget somewhat more once an Elastic IP and per-GB egress are counted. Those are their prices, not ours, and they can change them without telling us.
📡 What actually happens on each plan

Same relay, same CLI, two different things done with the address.

Static IP

The address comes to you.

1

The relay comes up in your account

cloudspectra up creates the VM with your own cloud token and reads its public IPv4 and IPv6. This is the moment your provider starts charging you for the machine.

2

The address moves onto your machine

Both families, every port, inbound and outbound. Applications see the public address as their own, because it is.

3

You take it somewhere else

cloudspectra up --take-over on another machine carries the same address across in seconds. The old machine drops off; only one holds it at a time. Moving costs nothing extra -- only running two addresses simultaneously counts as two.

Shared VPN

You come to the address.

1

The relay comes up in your account

The same VM, in the same place, on the same provider bill, configured to carry many peers at once instead of one.

2

You invite the team

The account owner issues a single-use invite token per member. Each member ends up holding their own credential, and can connect as many devices as they like.

3

Everyone gets out through the relay

Traffic leaves with the relay's address (SNAT). No address is transferred to a member, and no member is reachable inbound on it. Billing follows the members: per user, per connected hour.

Things worth knowing before you pay

None of this is buried in the terms.

📡

The relay reports in

VPN Twin contacts a Cloud Spectra control plane. On Shared VPN that report is what the bill is computed from, because the plan is metered by the hour. On Static IP the price is flat and the report is not used to compute the bill, but the relay still contacts us: it is how the address is handed between your devices, and how a cancelled subscription stops being served. It is a property of the product, not an analytics choice. Our Gateway products send no telemetry unless you explicitly opt in -- the full disclosure is in the Trust Center.

☁

Your account, your token

The relay is provisioned in your cloud account with your API token. We never receive that token and never see your cloud bill. We operate no relay of our own and hold no IP address, which is also why the address you get is a real one from your provider rather than something rented back to you.

💳

Stopping is easy

No signup fee, no minimum term, cancel at any time. Cancel Static IP mid-month and the flat charge is applied pro rata for the days you held the address. Cancel Shared VPN and it simply stops accruing hours -- you are billed for what had already run. cloudspectra billing opens the billing portal for invoices, card changes and cancellation. Remember to destroy the relay VM in your own provider console too.

One subscription can carry both. If you start on Static IP and later want a shared relay for your team -- or the other way round -- the second mode is added as another line on the same subscription rather than as a second account. Buying, though, is per plan: you choose one at checkout, and add the other afterwards.

Still not sure which one?

If you need to be reached, take the Static IP. If a group needs to get out together, take the Shared VPN. If it is genuinely both, start with one -- the other is a line you can add later.

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