Public buyers spend money that a legislature, a board or a grant has already set aside for a fixed period, and they can’t commit to more than that. A bill sized after the fact can’t be signed, and a reseller in the middle can’t stand behind an unknown total. That’s why Orion is sold as a subscription with one annual number, counted in Managed Core Hours, with growth settled at renewal.
Why can’t a public buyer sign an open-ended bill?
A reseller who sells into universities and state agencies told us this summer that “a lot of public customers, they can’t write a blank check.” He was describing how public money works, and that call shaped how we sell Orion.
At the federal level the rule is law. The Antideficiency Act bars agencies from committing to pay money before it has been appropriated. States and local governments handle multi-year contracts with a non-appropriation clause, which lets the agency end the contract without penalty if next year’s funding doesn’t come through. Illinois, for one, requires that clause in contracts that run past the current fiscal year.
The reseller on that call described the practical result. The buyer has to be able to say what they are purchasing for this period. Anything beyond it is a new PO, which means going back to budgeting. A bill that arrives after the fact, sized by whatever happened that month, doesn’t fit. Nobody in the purchasing office can sign for it.
Why does the reseller care?
Many public buyers purchase through a reseller on net 30 or net 45 terms. The reseller issues its own PO to the vendor, commits to pay once the product is delivered, and then waits for the customer to pay. If the amount is open-ended, the reseller is guaranteeing a number nobody knows. Resellers check a customer’s credit before they stand behind a deal, and they can’t do that against an unknown total.
So the number has to be fixed for the buyer and for everyone between the buyer and us.
How is Orion priced for a public buyer?
Orion is sold as a subscription with a known annual number. You buy one year, or you commit to a multi-year term at a lower rate. Either way the PO says one number for the period it covers.
The unit behind that number is the Managed Core Hour, which is one worker CPU core, managed by Orion, for one hour. We only charge for what Juno is managing. The counting rules are short.
Worker nodes count. Management nodes are free.
Physical cores count, never threads. A 48-core node with 96 threads counts as 48.
GPUs are never licensed. A node with eight GPUs counts the same as that node without them.
There are no user counts and no server counts.
That last rule matters more to public buyers than I expected. Seat counts change every semester. Physical cores on a set of nodes don’t, and anyone with access to the hardware list can check them.
What happens if we add nodes mid-year?
Research groups add nodes when a grant lands, and departments join halfway through the year. We see it all the time on research computing clusters.
Orion never shuts off a workload because you went past the cores on your license. Growth gets trued up at renewal, on its own PO, timed with the renewal. Nobody in your purchasing office gets an invoice in month seven for something they didn’t approve.
The license itself is a signed file that Orion checks locally. Orion doesn’t phone home and no logs leave your site to count cores. That holds for every deployment, connected or offline, so a cluster with no internet connection is priced exactly like one with it.
What should go on the PO?
If you’re the person writing the request, this is what we ask for.
The list of worker nodes you want Orion to manage, with the physical core count for each. Make and model is enough if you don’t have the counts handy.
The term, either one year or a multi-year commitment.
A start date that lines up with your fiscal year or your grant period, so the renewal lands when you have money to renew with.
The reseller you buy through, if you have one, so the quote goes through them.
Standard support is included in the subscription, so it isn’t a separate line. Paid support tiers exist if you need them.
When is a fixed annual number the wrong fit?
A fixed annual number is the right answer for a cluster that runs all year. It is a worse answer for a lab that wants to try Orion for a few weeks on borrowed hardware. For that, Community Edition is free to install and runs two workloads at a time, with no PO at all. When you want to test properly on your own hardware, a paid Proof of Value covers it, and part of the fee comes off your first year if you sign after the readout.
We don’t publish rates. The number depends on your core count and your term, and I’d rather give you the total for your cluster than a rate you have to multiply out. The pricing page has the details on what counts.
Send us your node list and we’ll send back one number for the year. Get a quote
WRITTEN BY
Tony Como
Tony runs go-to-market at Juno, from first outreach to production deployment. He works across sales, partnerships, and operations to help technical teams move faster without adding infrastructure overhead.