Create a New Subscription

In Space and Time, a Subscription allows you to manage a larger group of users by assigning roles such as Admins and Owners. Having a Subscription also unlocks many advanced features across the Space and Time network.

To create a new subscription, you'll first need a UserID. If you don't have a UserID yet, take a moment to create one.

Create a New User with Studio

The easiest way to create a new user is with Space and Time Studio, as it has wrapped all steps into a simple UI. To get started:

Navigate to Space and Time Studio web application.
Click on "Sign in" in the upper-right, and then on the "Register" button.
Enter the "UserName" and "Password" you prefer. A few considerations:
1. UserNames are globally unique across the network, so get your favorite early!
2. UserNames can contain alpha-numeric characters, as well as underscores ( _ )
3. Both UserName and Password are case-sensitive, so Alice is different than alice
4. Password will include requirements to include alpha and numeric characters (for security)
Enter your Email - once your account is created, SXT will send you an email to verify ownership.
Optionally, if you have a joincode, you can enter it here, or you can also enter any time after account creation. If you don't have a joincode - no worries! This is only needed if you're joining an existing subscription.
Click "Create Account" and you're done!

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Congrats! You now have a Space and Time account!

Create your Subscription

Creating a new subscription is extremely simple using Space and Time Studio! Having a subscription opens up certain features (like creating tables) and higher performance, which are unavailable under the "Free Trial" version.

To create a new subscription:

Navigate to Space and Time Studio, click on "Sign In" in the upper-right most corner, and log in.
Note: the UserID who creates the subscription will be the first "owner" and have full super-admin permissions.
Click on "My Account" in the upper-right (replaces "Sign In") and click on "Account Settings".
On the left side pane, click on "My Subscription" which will show your current plan - by default, that is "Free Trial" (aka no subscription). Since we're creating a new subscription, click on "upgrade plan" and select the plan that works best for you.
Enter your credit card information (or coming soon, crypto payments!) to generate your new subscription!

Broadly speaking, there are two types of plans:

"Fixed Rate" - select one of the fixed rate plans if you want predictable spend for known workloads. When selecting this subscription type, your card will be charged a prorated amount for the remaining time in the current billing cycle, then from that point forward monthly.
"Pay per Compute" - select this usage-based plan to only pay for what you use, similar to Web3 gas or serverless apps. If you're not sure, this is a great way to get started at a low cost!

Another advantage of the Pay per Compute plan is the flexibility in how you want to manage your credits:

Run a negative balance, then pay up to zero on a monthly basis - effectively allowing you to be charged in arrears. Note, there is a soft-cap to your negative balance, starting at -$100, after which the subscription will be paused. This could cause a mid-month interruption in service until you manually add funds, or the end of the month charge resets to zero.
Prepay for positive balance of credits that can be consumed over time as your subscription issues queries. The main advantage of this approach are volume discounts available when pre-purchasing credits, making them more cost-effective.

In either usage-based plan, there are options to "Configure Auto Purchase Credits" under the Credit Card menu. For example, you can turn on "Automatic Charge on Negative Balance" which will bring a negative balance back to zero when it hits the soft-cap, thus preventing a service interruption. Or if you pre-purchase credits, "Auto-Load Credit Feature" will automatically pre-purchase a set amount of credits when your balance hits zero.

All Autopay features are disabled by default.

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Congrats! You now have a Space and Time subscription!

Now that you have a subscription, you can add new members! Check out this page on generating and distributing JoinCodes to your team!