Billing and Plans
CTFFactory is a subscription SaaS. Every plan includes challenge generation; higher tiers raise the usage limits and unlock hosting, collaboration and enterprise features.
There are five plans: Free, Student, Starter, Team and Business.
[!IMPORTANT] Where the real numbers live. Plan quotas are configuration, not code — they are stored in the platform database and can be tuned per deployment. The pricing page and Workspace Settings → Billing read those values live and are therefore the authoritative reference for your installation. This page explains what is metered and how; it deliberately avoids repeating figures that would drift out of date.
What each plan meters
| Dimension | What it bounds |
|---|---|
| AI credits per month | how much generation you can do in a billing cycle |
| Concurrent generations | how many generation jobs run at the same time |
| Active managed CTFs | how many live events you can host simultaneously |
| CTF duration | how long a deployed event stays up before it is reclaimed |
| Participants per CTF | how many players can join one event |
| Challenges per CTF | challenge volume in a single event |
| Workbench concurrency | how many analysis sandboxes may run at once (see below) |
| Challenge categories | Free is limited to a subset; paid plans unlock all categories |
| Scheduled deployments | whether an event can be scheduled instead of started by hand |
| SSO / RBAC, dedicated environment, custom domain | workspace and enterprise features |
Anything shown as unlimited means the platform applies no bound for that plan.
AI credits
Credits are consumed when the platform generates challenge content. The cost is per challenge, not per click:
| What you generate | Credit cost |
|---|---|
| A standard challenge | 1 credit |
| A workbench challenge (PCAP, memory, stego, disk, encoding, zip, rev, crypto) | 2 credits |
| A chain / mesh of N challenges | the sum of the individual costs |
Workbench challenges cost more because the platform also builds and hosts the isolated analysis environment they are solved in. Since workbench mode is on by default for artifact-bearing challenges, budget accordingly — or turn it off per event (see Challenge Workbenches) if you would rather publish downloadable files.
Included credits reset at the start of each billing cycle and do not roll over. The exact cost of a generation is shown before you confirm it.
Buying more credits
Additional credit packs are available from Workspace Settings → Billing without changing your subscription tier. Packs are consumed only once your included monthly credits are exhausted.
Workbench concurrency quotas
Analysis sandboxes are metered separately from credits, because they consume live infrastructure rather than one-off generation work. Three bounds apply at once:
| Scope | What it bounds |
|---|---|
| Per player | sandboxes one user may hold open at the same time |
| Per organisation | sandboxes all members of your workspace hold combined |
| Per event | sandboxes all participants of one CTF hold, across accounts |
Two consequences worth knowing when you plan an event:
- The per-event bound follows the organiser's plan, not the participant's — a Free-plan player joining your event never shrinks its capacity.
- Reaching an organisation or event bound puts players in a numbered waiting list; they are admitted automatically as sandboxes free up. Reaching your own per-player bound instead asks you to close one of your sandboxes, since you are the only one who can.
Idle sandboxes are reclaimed automatically, so an abandoned one does not hold a slot indefinitely.
The Free plan in practice
Free is meant for evaluation and solo practice. The limits that matter most:
- No managed CTF hosting. You can generate challenges and open workbenches, but not host a live event for participants.
- Challenge categories are restricted to a subset rather than the full catalogue.
- The smallest credit allowance, and no credit packs — raising it means upgrading.
- One workspace member. No team invitations.
- The shortest event duration and the lowest concurrency across every dimension above.
Workbenches themselves are not gated by plan: every plan, Free included, can open one. What the plan changes is how many may run at the same time.
Managing your subscription
From Workspace Settings → Billing you can review your current plan and renewal date, track credit usage for the cycle, buy credit packs, upgrade or downgrade, download invoices, and update your payment method.
Subscription changes take effect at the start of the next billing cycle. A downgrade does not delete data, but features the lower plan does not include stop working until you upgrade again.
Business plans
Business accounts are invoiced annually and cover custom credit allocations, dedicated infrastructure, data residency selection and a named account manager. Contact [email protected] for a quote.