Usage, limits, and billing
Check your Chainguard Starter or Chainguard Team organization's usage against its plan limits, and respond to a refused …
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Chainguard Team is Chainguard’s paid self-serve plan. You upgrade a Chainguard Starter organization to Team with chainctl and pay by card, and Team limits apply as soon as the first payment succeeds. This page covers upgrading, what changes afterward, how billing works, and how to change your card or cancel.
You need the following:
limited_owner or owner role in that organization. The person who created a Starter organization has the limited_owner role.chainctl 0.2.394 or later. To update it, run sudo chainctl update, or brew upgrade chainctl if you installed it with Homebrew.To upgrade to Team, complete the following steps:
Run chainctl plans update with --plan team:
chainctl plans update --plan teamIf you belong to more than one organization, add --parent with the name of the organization to upgrade.
In the checkout page that opens in your browser, enter your card and billing address, select the checkbox to accept the terms, then save your card. If the page shows I’m purchasing as a business, which depends on your billing country, you can select it and enter a business tax ID, such as a VAT number. Saving the card doesn’t charge it.
Wait for the first payment. Chainguard charges the card for the first month, and your organization moves to Team once the charge succeeds. That usually takes a few minutes.
Confirm the upgrade:
chainctl plans describeThe output names the Team plan. Until the payment succeeds, it still reads Starter.
Sign in again, so your credentials carry the owner role that the upgrade gives you:
chainctl auth loginIf you’re working on a machine without a browser, such as over SSH, add --no-browser. The command prints the checkout page’s URL, which you can open on another device.
Your organization keeps its name, members, and images, and gets the following:
owner role for you. The person who completes checkout is made an owner of the organization, as long as they still have the owner or limited_owner role when the upgrade completes. Other members keep their roles. Consider giving the owner role to a second person, so the organization doesn’t depend on a single person.After the upgrade, chainctl starter status and chainctl starter add-images work as they did on Starter. They need chainctl 0.2.399 or later; earlier releases report that no Starter organization exists.
Team pull tokens are limited to 7 days, a limit Chainguard doesn’t enforce yet. For CI pipelines, use a CI identity instead; refer to Chainguard plans.
If you created your organization with a personal email address, its Checks and Workspaces compute stops at the included amount rather than being metered past it.
Team is billed monthly, in advance, to the card you saved. The first month starts on the day you upgrade. Applicable tax is added. For the current price, refer to the Chainguard pricing page.
Storage above Team’s included 500 GiB is metered, and Chainguard starts charging for it on January 1, 2027. Checks and Workspaces compute past the included amount is metered, up to 2,000 vCPU-hours a month. To check your usage, refer to Usage, limits, and billing.
To replace the card your plan is charged to, run chainctl plans add-card. It opens a page where you save a new card, without charging anything:
chainctl plans add-cardIf the page shows I’m purchasing as a business, which depends on your billing country, you can also enter a business tax ID, such as a VAT number. The tax ID is saved with your billing details and appears on later invoices.
To cancel Team, contact Chainguard support. Refer to Get support. Your organization moves back to Starter, which includes up to five images, so support asks which images to keep.
To move to an Enterprise plan instead, contact Chainguard.
Last updated: 2026-11-10 18:15