Today, we are excited to release significant updates to our industry-leading Bitcoin development platform. Over the last several years, we’ve worked with some of the Lightning Network's largest and most active deployments. We constantly strive to provide the best experience and the most rock-solid platform on the market today. In 2023, we achieved SOC2 compliance and launched our observability tool and Just-In-Time liquidity solution. These were all in direct response to our customers and ecosystem requests.
As we start 2024, we anticipate a significant increase in network participants for Bitcoin on-chain and the Lightning Network. We’ve made some updates to our platform to prepare for this influx.
First, we significantly updated our dashboard to streamline the experience of using Voltage. Second, we’ve added support for Teams on the platform to allow easy collaboration. Finally, we’ve updated our pricing to better align with our customers. Let’s break down each one in more depth!
Dashboard Redesign
Having an easy-to-use and streamlined UI is imperative in today’s products. We gathered a lot of feedback based on our previous design and have created a new experience that is insightful, simple, and helpful. Previously, managing your node and viewing your data in Surge were separate experiences. In this update, we’ve combined them into a single dashboard so it’s straightforward to manage your node and see everything happening.
Additional updates include a new place to manage access and bake macaroons, a rebuilt page for logs that includes filters, and an in-line activity feed. This redesign will not only make it easier to use Voltage, it will also set the groundwork for some notable updates that will come later this year.
Teams
We heard you! Adding support for team management inside of Voltage has been one of our most requested features. We are pleased to say it’s finally here. With this update, you can add additional users to your team, grant them specific types of access, and allow others to view or manage your nodes. Quickly see all your team members in a single place and ensure they follow best practices regarding MFA.
This is a beneficial feature for developers interacting with nodes for an organization and other parts of your organization. This includes departments like Finance, Accounting, and Support. Now, you can grant users read-only access to your nodes so they can view transactions, run reports, or check balances without being able to adjust settings or send payments. This will be a big unlock for teams building with Voltage.
Pricing
Finally, we are significantly revising our pricing and packaging for the platform. We are doing this to enable users to pay only for what they need, understand their bills, and drastically simplify how our users pay for Voltage services. With this update, we are changing how our nodes are priced, what services cost money, and introducing the concept of plans. Before we dive into the details, we want to call out how this affects our users. Because this update changes many factors, some customer’s monthly costs will go up, some will stay the same, and some will go down.
Compute Credits
With this update, we are transitioning away from the Lite, Standard, and Professional node types we’ve had since the beginning. These will be replaced with small, medium, large, and extra-large node types. Now, you’re probably wondering how the functionality differs in these new node types compared to previous types.
Over the next several months, we will make all nodes identical in functionality. This means depreciating Neutrino, giving all nodes a clearnet IP address, and enabling all functionality such as Lightning Terminal. We’re making this change to increase the stability of customer nodes and make them easy to understand.
Under these new types of node sizes, your node will be allotted a specific amount of CPU and memory. As you increase your usage and/or channel counts, the node could require a size increase. Our customers can see their CPU and memory usage on their dashboard to understand how their node performs. This ensures that customers only pay for what they need and nothing more.
Node types will now consume Compute Credits instead of being charged hourly. Compute Credits are included in your plan (outlined below) and can be purchased. Each node consumes a specific amount of credits based on size. Today’s Lite and Standard nodes consume 2 compute credits, and a Professional Node consumes 10. As we roll out the new types, a Small node is 2 Compute Credits, a Medium node is 10 Compute Credits, a Large node is 30 Compute Credits, and an Extra Large node is 55 Compute Credits.
API Calls
An additional vector we’re introducing in the coming months is tracking API Calls. The vast majority of customers leverage our products via their APIs, and we have a lot of new products that will be purely API-driven. We are adding our API to our pricing model to align with our customers and roadmap. Just like Compute Credits, each plan comes with an allocation of API Calls. You pay for the extra usage if you surpass your plan’s usage. This enables easy auto-scaling and simple billing management.
Introducing Plans
Finally, we are introducing plans for Voltage! Previously, all our products were al-a-carte and priced by the hour. This led to confusion around billing and sporadic charging of credit cards. As part of this release, we are updating the Voltage billing platform to conform closer to a standard SaaS product. All users can select a plan based on their usage and required features. After you choose a plan, you will get a consistent bill every month that includes all your infrastructure and API usage.
All existing users have been automatically migrated into this new structure today with no changes to your infrastructure. As mentioned, we will release further updates in the coming months to update node types, introduce API call tracking, and more. If you have any questions about how you are affected by this price change, please email support@voltage.cloud.
As we said at the beginning, this is a significant update. To get the full breakdown, you can read the release notes here. We are excited to share all these changes and enhancements with you as we prepare for a large influx in Bitcoin and Lightning adoption in the coming months and years.
If you have questions or want to connect with other builders, join our 700+ member Discord community. Reach out to support with any questions, and we’d be happy to help. We’re looking forward to continuing the spread of Bitcoin worldwide with all of you!
Start building on Voltage today.
