If you've looked at your site's Hosting tab and seen a "runway" number instead of a bill, this post explains what that means and why we designed it that way.
Every canister — the smart-contract container your site lives in — needs cycles to run. Cycles pay for storage, bandwidth, and compute the same way a traditional host charges for server time, except the accounting happens on-chain instead of on an invoice. No cycles left, and the network freezes the canister until it's topped up again.
That's a very different mental model from "my hosting bill is due on the 1st," so we don't expose raw cycle counts as the headline number. Instead, your dashboard shows runway: roughly how many days of normal operation are left at the site's current burn rate.
The one thing that isn't recoverable is deleting a site outright — that burns whatever cycles remain rather than refunding them, so treat delete as final.
Right now, Webstead funds cycles for you. Each site has a monthly top-up budget, and your account has a plan-level quota on top of that — when either is reached, automatic top-ups pause until the next month (or until you raise the budget). Importantly: a paused top-up never pauses your site's deploys — it only means we stop adding cycles until the budget resets. Your site keeps serving traffic on whatever runway it has left.
We show the math instead of hiding it because we think "your host silently throttled you" is a worse experience than "here's exactly how many days you have and why."
The full walkthrough, including how top-up budgets interact with your plan quota, lives in the docs: Cycles, runway, and top-ups.