We're stoked to be presenting a new billing model on the Voltage platform. Pay-per-hour Lightning nodes. Starting today, you can create a node without having a subscription. You're simply charged for the number of hours the node is online and a bill is generated at the end of the month. By removing the requirement of a subscription to run a node, we're unlocking a whole new set of use cases for our platform. Let's expand on those a little bit.
Development
Maintaining a development environment can be a pain sometimes. Things like Lightning Polar make it way better than it was previously, but collaborating across teams is still a challenge. Setting up and tearing down nodes by hand is annoying and a waste of time. Now you can use Voltage to run a node for testing or development for a few hours, few days, or few weeks.
Ephemeral Nodes
Short lived nodes, or 'burner nodes' as we like to call them, can be helpful for some use cases as well. There's situations where you might not want to expose your personal node for privacy reasons. Like during a really big Bitcoin Conference. Now you can create a node for the duration of the event and not have to worry about exposing any personal data. Or worry about your cat knocking your node off the shelf back at home for that matter.
Get Started
The node creation process is the same easy process. However, now there's a new Billing Option called 'Pay per hour'. Simply select that and continue with your node creation. When you're done with the node you can just delete it. It's that easy! At the end of the month a bill will be generated for you based on the number of hours you had nodes running. Lite nodes are billed at $0.027/hr and Standard nodes are billed at $0.053/hr.
If you have any questions you can email us or chat in our Telegram group. We're looking forward to seeing how our users take advantage of this new way to run Lightning nodes.