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User Guide

Usage limits

Check compute hours, storage quotas, and AI allowances in qBraid Lab.

Your subscription plan sets your compute, storage, and AI allowances. Check your remaining usage and renewal dates in the selected workspace’s account dashboard.

Compute hours

Your plan includes compute hours for subscription CPU instances. On-demand instances use credits instead of this allowance.

Compute hours equal the allocated vCPUs multiplied by the hours used. For example, running a 2-vCPU instance for 3 hours uses 6 CPU hours, and running an 8-vCPU instance for 2 hours uses 16 CPU hours.

See subscription plans for current compute-hour allowances.

Open Account > Usage to inspect your compute-hour balance and renewal date. The page also shows session counts, daily usage, and total compute hours used. Use Compute Settings to manage credit spending.

If your allowance is exhausted and credit spending cannot cover the session, launching a subscription CPU instance fails with Launch failed: Compute hours exhausted and insufficient credits. See Troubleshooting for how to resolve it.

Auto-switch to credits

To use wallet credits after your compute allowance runs out, enable automatic credit spending:

  1. Open Account > Usage > Compute Settings.
  2. Enable Auto-switch to Credits.

When compute hours run out, eligible sessions spend wallet credits.

With auto-switch enabled, sessions can continue while you have enough credits. Check the launch screen for the current rate, as described in Pricing.

Disk usage

Your subscription tier sets the storage quota for subscription Lab. See subscription plans for the plan allowances and Account > Usage for your effective quota.

Disk usage includes files, notebooks, environments, and data stored in subscription Lab. Check your usage in Account before adding large files or environments.

To do so, click Dashboard in the left sidebar and scroll to the Usage Overview section at the bottom of the page. For more details, go to Account > Usage in the left sidebar.

Inside Lab, open Settings to check your storage usage and quota.

Exceeding disk usage quotas

Once the disk is full, notebook cells start failing with errors such as [Errno 28] No space left on device or database or disk is full. See No space left on device for how to recognize and resolve this.

If Lab reports that you are over quota, reduce storage usage before resuming work. Follow the warning shown in your session. The quota and available disk capacity both limit how much data you can store.

Disk usage management

Installed Lab environments often use the most disk space. Uninstall environments you no longer need to free up storage.

To analyze your disk usage in detail, open the Terminal and run the gdu command:

gdu [flags] [directory_to_scan]

For more information on gdu, refer to the official documentation.

Once you’ve identified large or unwanted files and directories, you can delete them using the rm command in the Terminal:

rm -rf [directory_to_delete]

Alternatively, you can remove files and directories from the File Browser by right-clicking and selecting Delete.

On-demand instance billing

On-demand GPU and CPU instances charge credits separately from subscription compute hours.

  • Running instances charge compute and storage. Check the launch screen for the current rate. See pricing for details.
  • Stopped instances charge for retained disk capacity at the applicable storage rate.
  • Terminated instances incur no further charges. Termination permanently deletes the instance and its disk.

The default balance tiers allow up to five concurrent on-demand instances. Your account configuration can impose different limits. See On-Demand Instances for the thresholds and lifecycle details.

AI chat usage

Your plan includes an AI spending allowance. Usage depends on the selected model’s token rates, not a fixed number of prompts. See AI usage quotas for allowances, renewal dates, and credit-spending rules.

AI has a separate Auto-switch to Credits setting:

  1. Open Account > Usage > AI Chat Usage.
  2. Enable Auto-switch to Credits if your workspace policy permits it.

Further AI usage can spend wallet credits when the allowance is exhausted, provided you have sufficient credits. An organization policy or outstanding balance can prevent further requests.

Monitoring usage

Open Account > Usage from your account dashboard to inspect compute hours, storage, and AI usage. Select Refresh to retrieve current data.

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