Board: team pools and cost

The goal is to show a team sharing capacity, where adding people costs nothing and adding CPU costs by the hour.

Whiteboard outcome

When you’re done, the board shows a team (owner, admin, members), two pools in different regions, VMs inside them, the placement rule, and the monthly bill written next to each pool.

Before you draw: three questions

1. How many people, and do they trust each other’s VMs?
2. Is the workload steady or bursty (a CI week)?
3. Which regions do your users and data sit in?

Draw it in 8 steps

1. At the top left, draw a team box with three stick figures: Owner, Admin, Member. Say: “Work is $75 a month for the whole team, not per person” (https://exe.dev/docs/billing/work).
2. On the right, draw a dashed rectangle “pool: build, 8 vCPU / 16 GiB, LAX” with three small VMs. Say: “A pool is reserved CPU and memory in one region. It’s billed while it exists, empty or full” (https://exe.dev/docs/pools).
3. Below it, draw a second dashed rectangle “pool: prod, 4 vCPU / 8 GiB, FRA”. Say: “On Work you can have unlimited pools, in any region” (https://exe.dev/pricing).
4. Draw an arrow from the members to the build pool labeled team settings vm-placement pool build. Say: “new lands in the default pool, and --pool always overrides it” (https://exe.dev/docs/pools).
5. Write the cost next to each pool, with the sum below. Each pool’s 2 vCPU is included, and the rest is metered. Say it as derived math: the build pool is 3 extra units × $0.105 × 730.5 h ≈ $230.11, and prod is 1 extra unit ≈ $76.70. See Economics for the rules [verify: how the included 2 vCPU is applied across several pools].
6. Draw a small calendar with one week shaded, labeled pool resize build --cpus=16, then shrink it back. Say: “If you grow a pool for a busy week, the extra costs you that week only” (https://exe.dev/docs/billing/work).
7. Draw a padlock on the team box labeled “SSO + vm-sharing admins-only”. Say: “Use OIDC or Google sign-in, and only admins can share outside the team” (https://exe.dev/docs/teams/sso, https://exe.dev/docs/teams/sharing-controls).
8. At the bottom, write the rule: “Pay for capacity, not seats. Resize, don’t over-buy.”

flowchart LR
  subgraph T[Team on Work, $75/mo base]
    O[Owner]; A[Admin]; M[Members]
  end
  M -->|new| B
  subgraph B[pool build: 8 vCPU / 16 GiB, LAX]
    b1[ci-1]; b2[ci-2]; b3[dev]
  end
  subgraph P[pool prod: 4 vCPU / 8 GiB, FRA]
    p1[api]
  end
  A -->|pool new / resize| B
  A -->|pool new| P

The included-capacity detail, said carefully

• Included capacity. The Work plan includes 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB “across all of the team’s pools and standalone VMs”, applied to whatever is running at the same time (https://exe.dev/docs/billing/work, https://exe.dev/docs/standalone-vms).
• The pools doc example. “A team with one 4 vCPU pool pays the monthly price plus $0.105 per hour for the 2 vCPU above the included capacity” (https://exe.dev/docs/pools).
• Two pools. The included capacity is applied once, not once per pool. On the board, subtract it once from the total.

What they’ll ask