Tracking project spend

The Admin → Projects page is where attribution pays off. Pick a project on the left and its full cost picture appears on the right — what it’s burning right now, what it’s cost all-time, and where that money went.

Any org member can open this page. Admins can also add, rename, and archive projects from it; members see a read-only spend view.

The project selector

The left column lists every live project. Each row shows the project name plus a quick summary — its instance count and current hourly burn — so you can spot the expensive ones at a glance. Click a project to load its detail panel.

Admins get a + New project control at the bottom of the list.

The detail panel

Selecting a project shows three headline figures:

Stat	What it means
Current burn	The project’s live cost rate right now — compute plus storage — in $/hr, with an approximate $/day underneath. This is the rate the project is accruing at this instant, not a bill.
Total spent	Cumulative, all-time charged cost attributed to the project (compute + storage). This matches what’s actually been billed or metered.
Compute / storage	The cumulative total split into its compute and storage halves, so you can see which side dominates.

Instance and storage drill-down

Below the stats, the Instances section lists every instance currently attributed to the project — name, state, specs, host, and per-instance hourly cost — followed by the project’s storage bucket and its warm-storage cost, if it has one. It’s the same drill-down view admins get for org members, scoped to this project.

How the numbers are computed

Current burn is summed live from the project’s running instances and its bucket’s current warm-storage rate.
Total spent is summed from the project’s billing records. Every compute and storage billing interval carries a snapshot of the project it was attributed to at the time, so totals are exact and survive a project rename, archival, or bucket deletion. (This is also why re-assigning an instance never disturbs past totals.)

Because each project’s records are indexed by project, these lookups stay fast even with hundreds of thousands of billing intervals on the books.

Billing a project’s client directly

If you run projects on behalf of your own clients — pass-through billing — a project’s detail panel has a Generate prepay link button. It creates a Stripe Checkout link you send straight to your client, so they pay Carolina Cloud directly instead of paying you and you paying us. That’s one payment-processor fee instead of two.

Org admins only. Click Generate prepay link, enter your client’s email and the amount, and click Create link. Copy the link it returns and send it however you’d send an invoice — email, Slack, whatever your client expects.

When your client pays, they land on a plain Carolina Cloud confirmation page — they don’t need (or get) a dashboard account. Credits are added automatically, typically before they’ve even finished reading the confirmation page.

The credits land on your organization’s shared balance, the same pool every project draws from — there’s no separate per-project balance to manage. The purchase is tagged with the project it was generated for, so it shows up in that project’s history as a record of who paid for what; it isn’t a spending restriction.

Generate invoice (a bill-later, net-terms invoice rather than a pay-now link) is still coming soon.