Important Changes to Acorn Plans and Regions

At Acorn, we’re constantly striving to enhance and simplify our users’ experience. As we’ve observed early usage patterns, one point of friction we’ve noticed is the boundary between our Personal and Pro plans. For context, the Personal plan is our free tier while the Pro plan is our paid tier (though it too is zero cost while we’re in Public Beta). The particular points of friction we have noticed are:

• Transitioning an app from the free to paid is not easy or smooth
• Using regions to differentiate free vs paid is confusing. Regions should really only map to geography.

In response, we're implementing a series of changes, outlined below.

NOTE: We are still in Open Beta, offering all functionality at zero cost. Any discussion of price or cost pertains to our eventual state upon reaching General Availability.

Unification of Plans and Regions

We are unifying the Personal and Pro plans. Our new plan scheme will have just a single plan for individual accounts. This plan incurs no monthly base cost and you’ll only be charged for resource usage (compute, networking, and storage). On a per-app basis you can decide whether the app should run at the free or paid level.

NOTE: Apps on the free tier have limited compute, will be stopped after two hours, and deleted after eight.

Simultaneously, we're streamlining regions. Previously, we had a separate “Sandbox” region for folks on the Personal plan and a “General Purpose” region for folks on the Pro plan. The primary function of these different regions was to control free and paid apps, but since you can do that on an app-by-app basis, we no longer need separate regions. We’re also adding more geographic regions so that you can run your apps close to your users.

New Compute Classes

To specify whether an app should be free or paid, you’ll set its compute class. The UI now includes this option in the app creation flow, while the CLI supports it through the --compute-class flag or directly in the Acornfile. The two supported compute classes are named "free" and "standard," with "free" as the default. Soon, users will also have the option to set their preferred default for projects. Documentation for compute classes can be found here.

How this impacts you

For users in the entry-level Personal plan, the only change is gaining access to the "standard" compute class. Pro plan users should note that "free" is the default compute class, and for a persistent workload, setting the compute class explicitly to "standard" is essential. This functionality is available in the UI or via the CLI, as described below.

To update an existing app, use the following:

acorn update --compute-class standard <your_app_name>

For new apps, use:

acorn run --compute-class standard ...

In conclusion, we’re excited to bring these simplifications to our platform. We believe they’ll make Acorn even easier to use, especially for new users ramping up on the platform. Thanks to all our current users for all the great feedback thus far and we look forward to more in the future.