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BigFleet Providers

Pricing & interruption

BigFleet ranks capacity by effective cost = price_per_hour + interruption_probability × penalty. So a provider has to report both honestly. On Latitude.sh the story is unusually simple, and this page explains exactly why.

price_per_hour — published Latitude rates, in USD

Latitude.sh publishes a fixed hourly on-demand price per plan per site, in USD — so unlike Hetzner’s EUR prices, there is no FX conversion. The provider sources that rate from the Plans API (Plans.List → the plan’s per-region pricing.usd.hour), picks the entry for the machine’s site, and uses the hourly figure directly:

price_per_hour (USD) = latitude_plan_hourly_USD[site]
  • Prices are cached and refreshed off the hot path. At startup, and every --price-refresh (default 30m), the provider refreshes the price for each offered (plan, site) pair. List/Get read the cache and never block on the pricing API.
  • A pinned USD table is the fallback. Common c/s/m/g series plans have pinned baseline hourly prices, so the fake backend, credential-free conformance, and a pricing-API outage all still produce a sensible price_per_hour. Live Latitude data overlays it (and picks up the small per-site premium).
  • The cost field is a relative ranking signal, so the pinned table is not load-bearing for correctness — but keep --price-refresh non-zero so the live rates overlay the baseline, and a stale baseline doesn’t skew effective-cost across the fleet.

interruption_probability — a genuine zero

interruption_probability is the hourly chance the provider reclaims the machine out from under the workload. It is provider-declared only — no cluster can override it.

Latitude.sh bare metal is on-demand only. There is no spot/preemptible market. Latitude does not reclaim a running on-demand server to satisfy other demand. So the correct, real, provider-declared value is exactly 0.0 for every machine.

This is the important distinction the conformance program checks: a zero here is not a skipped or forgotten field — it is the true value for this substrate. That is different from a spot machine declared at 0, which would be a bug (effective_cost would understate the real risk and the machine would win high-penalty workloads it should never get). Because Latitude has no spot tier, the provider:

  • declares capacity_type = ON_DEMAND for every machine,
  • sets interruption_probability = 0.0,
  • and does not claim the spot conformance profile — so the SPOT-interruption_probability > 0 behaviors skip-as-pass rather than apply.

The provider also rejects a spot capacity_type in an offering at startup, rather than silently mis-declaring a zero interruption probability for capacity that doesn’t exist.

On-demand, not bare-metal — and why it matters for cost

It is tempting to model physical hardware as capacity_type = BARE_METAL with price_per_hour = 0 (the box is “already owned”). That is wrong for Latitude.sh, because the box is not owned — it is rented by the hour and released on Delete. So:

  • the capacity type is ON_DEMAND (a real Delete deprovisions and stops billing the box), not BARE_METAL,
  • price_per_hour is the real hourly USD rate (not zero — you pay for every hour the server is deployed), and
  • declaring BARE_METAL would also suppress the shard’s Delete (M73), so the provider would keep paying for a box it can no longer reclaim. See Configuration → Why on_demand, not bare_metal.

A genuinely owned bare-metal substrate (where the hardware is already paid for and Delete is Unimplemented) is the bare-metal profile, with price_per_hour = 0 and interruption_probability = 0. That is not what this provider does: Latitude.sh is on-demand, billed by the hour, with a real Delete.

If Latitude ever ships a spot tier

The contract is ready for it. If Latitude introduces a real preemptible market, the correct change is to set capacity_type = SPOT and a real, non-zero interruption forecast for those machines (observed where possible, forecast for Speculative slots), and to claim the spot profile. Never leave a spot machine at 0.