GETTING STARTED

Licenses, plans and seats

What each plan unlocks, how a seat is counted, and how to activate or move a license.

DockBoard is free on one server, and priced per server after that. Billing follows servers, not deployments — you can ship a hundred times a day on a plan that costs the same as shipping once a month.

The server itself stays with your provider. You pay for the platform, never for the machine.

The three plans

Plan	For	What it unlocks
Free	One server, local mode, personal projects.	3 applications and 1 database, unlimited domains and SSL, the project network and service mesh, manual backups kept 7 days, community support.
Pro	Multi-server, a small team, production.	Unlimited servers, applications and databases; automatic backups kept 30 days; project migration between servers; persistent volumes and 14-day logs; 5 members with per-project roles; email support within 24 h.
Business	Several teams, compliance requirements, an operations function.	Everything in Pro, plus SSO and the audit log, hourly backups kept 90 days, S3-compatible offsite retention, a mail server per domain, unlimited members, priority support with a 99.9 % SLA.

Yearly billing is 20 % cheaper than monthly. Changing plan or stopping is immediate — there is no commitment period.

What counts as a server

A seat is one machine that can run your workloads — the machine hosting the panel if it also deploys, plus every remote server you have added with the agent. Two consequences worth stating plainly:

Applications, databases, domains, projects, deployments and instances are not counted. Ten applications on one server is one seat.
Every node of a cluster is a machine, so a three-node cluster is three seats.

Seats are not the same thing as quotas. Your plan says how many machines you may drive; quotas say how much of a machine a given project or user may consume. They are set independently, by you.

Activating a license

01Buy a plan in the shop. You receive a signed license key.
02In the dashboard, go to Admin → License and paste it.
03The instance validates the key and the Pro-gated features light up immediately — no restart.

A provisioning script can skip all three by preseeding the key at install time — see preseeding a license.

Removing the key at Admin → License downgrades the whole install to the free tier — every Pro-gated feature off for every user at once. That is why it is its own permission (license:manage) rather than part of general configuration: a support-desk sub-admin has no reason to hold it. See roles.

Moving a license to another machine

A license is bound to the instance that activated it, which is what stops one key from licensing a fleet. When you rebuild a server — new VM, restored image, migrated provider — the old instance still holds the seat, so the new one is refused.

Deactivate the old instance in your shop account first, then activate the new one. Over the API that is a single call — see deactivating an instance.

If you rebuild machines routinely, put the deactivate call in the teardown half of your provisioning script rather than doing it by hand. A freed seat costs nothing; a seat held by a machine that no longer exists costs one.

Add-ons

Independent of the plan, billed only if you take them:

Add-on	What it is
Mail server, per domain	Postfix and Dovecot, DNS health checks, managed DKIM. Included on Business.
Offsite backup, per GB	Replication to your own S3-compatible bucket.
Reverse DNS / PTR	Guided setup with your server provider — needed for deliverable mail.
24/7 on-call	Phone escalation with a one-hour response target.

Prices are exclusive of tax. The current figures are on the pricing page — this page describes what you get, not what it costs today.