Customers are your only source of income. They rent cloud services, pay by the hour as long as those services run well, and expect a certain level of quality in return. This page follows a customer's life, from prospect to renewal (or departure).
¶ 🔄 A customer's life
¶ 📥 Prospects
Potential customers arrive regularly on the console's Prospects page — more often when your reputation is good. Only a few can wait at the same time.
Each prospect shows its needs (for example "2 × VM S"), its hourly billing, its signing bonus, the term of the proposed contract, and your capacity to host it:
| Capacity | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 🟢 Sufficient | Everything fits in your servers' real capacity. |
| 🟠 Overcommit | Some services only fit by overcommitting your servers. |
| 🔴 Short | Some services would find no room at all and stay pending. |
| 🔬 R&D required | The prospect wants a service you can't sell yet. Develop it through R&D before it leaves! |
¶ What you can do
| Action | Effect |
|---|---|
| ✅ Accept | It becomes a customer. Its signing bonus is paid after a day of service — only if its SLA is met. |
| 💬 Negotiate (% button) | Ask for a higher price (and bonus). Two levels of increase; the tooltip gives your chance of success, better with a good reputation. One try only — if refused, the prospect leaves. |
| ❌ Reject | It goes away. |
| ⏳ Do nothing | After about a game day, it signs with a competitor. |
When capacity is short, Accept asks for a confirmation. Services that find no room stay pending: they earn nothing and drag the customer's satisfaction down from day one.
¶ 🌟 Special orders
From time to time, an important prospect shows up in the Special orders card: bigger needs, a deadline, and a deadline bonus at stake.
- The deadline counts down from the signature: that's the time you have to install the missing hardware.
- The bonus is paid as soon as all its services are up and running properly.
- Miss the deadline and the bonus is lost — but the contract goes on normally.
- While the deadline runs, the customer is patient: waiting services don't count against you yet.
- You can't negotiate with these customers.
¶ 🏷️ Customer tiers
Every customer belongs to a tier. The higher the tier, the bigger and more varied its needs, the better it pays… and the less it forgives. 😅
| Tier | Availability expected | Pay | Contract length | Patience when unhappy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥉 Starter | ≈ 80 % | 💲 | a few days | ⏳⏳⏳⏳ |
| 🥈 Pro | ≈ 95 % | 💲💲 | one to two weeks | ⏳⏳⏳ |
| 🥇 Business | ≈ 99 % | 💲💲💲 | two weeks to a month | ⏳⏳ |
| 💎 Enterprise | ≈ 99.9 % | 💲💲💲💲 | one to two months | ⏳ |
Below its target, a customer is also refunded a growing share of what it pays, higher for higher tiers. See SLA and Reputation.
¶ 🔓 Unlocking tiers
At first, only Starter customers knock at your door. Each next tier unlocks once you meet three conditions at the same time:
- Customers served: customers of the previous tier signed for at least a game day and above their SLA target.
- Reputation: high enough (see SLA and Reputation).
- Revenue: everything your contracts have billed since the start (bonuses don't count).
For example, at the time of writing, unlocking Pro asks for 5 Starter customers served, a reputation of 60 and $1,500 billed. Your progress is shown at the top of the Prospects page. An unlocked tier stays unlocked forever.
¶ ☁️ The services you sell
| Service | Profile | Best hardware |
|---|---|---|
| 💻 VM | General purpose, variable CPU | Compute server |
| 🎮 GPU VM | Heavy computation on GPUs | GPU server required |
| 🪣 S3 (object storage) | Little CPU, huge amounts of disk | Storage server |
| ⚖️ Load Balancer | Network-heavy | Fast switches, a good Internet link |
| 🗃️ DBaaS (managed database) | RAM and disk, very latency-sensitive | Compute server close to its VMs |
| ☸️ Kubernetes | Lots of CPU and RAM | 2U compute server |
At the start of a game you only sell VMs. Every other service is unlocked by an R&D project. AI labs (big GPU customers) only show up from the Business tier.
¶ 📜 Contracts, renewals and departures
The Customers page lists every contract: tier, services, hourly billing, measured SLA against the target, and the end of the term.
When a contract reaches the end of its term:
- if its SLA was met, the customer may renew for the same term — the better your reputation, the more likely;
- otherwise, or if it prefers a competitor, it leaves with its services.
A customer whose SLA stays below target for too long doesn't wait for the end of its term: it cancels, and your reputation takes a hit. The Term ends column then shows, in red, how much time you have left to fix things.
Terminate (two clicks) ends a contract yourself: you lose its billing, and its bonus if it hasn't been paid yet.
Overcommitting to sign a customer you can't really serve is risky: its waiting services hurt its satisfaction from day one, and it may leave before you even see its bonus.