If your company runs Odoo on Odoo.sh, it has probably already happened to you: an email arrives saying you've run out of space, or recommending another worker, or the monthly bill simply comes in different from last month's. And nobody in the office can explain why.
It's not that you're being overcharged. It's that Odoo.sh charges for three things almost nobody understands until the bill arrives: workers, staging and gigabytes. This article explains all three in business language, without jargon, and ends with what you can do about it.
1. The worker: supermarket checkouts
Think of a supermarket. A worker is an open checkout register.
Every time someone in your company clicks "save," runs a report, validates an invoice or looks up a customer, that action waits in line to go through a checkout. If there's only one checkout open and ten people click at the same time, nine wait.
That's exactly what your team is feeling when they say "Odoo is slow": it's not that the system is slow, it's that there are too few checkouts open for the number of people working.
Odoo's own documentation gives the rule: one worker handles about 6 people clicking at the same time, which in a typical office equals about 25 registered users, because most of the day people are reading or typing, not pressing buttons.
| Users in your company | Workers you'll typically need |
|---|---|
| Up to 25 | 1 |
| 25 a 50 | 2 |
| 50 a 100 | 3 a 4 |
There are exceptions that push that number up fast: an active point of sale, an online store with traffic, heavy accounting reports or large imports. Each of those is like a customer showing up at the checkout with three full carts.
Why this shows up on your bill: on Odoo.sh each worker is billed separately, every month. When your company grows from 20 to 35 people, it's not just the per-user license that changes: you also have to open another checkout.
2. Staging: the rehearsal room
A staging is a copy of your system where changes are tested without touching the live operation.
It's the right place to test an upgrade, a new module or a change to the invoice format before your customers see it. Used well, staging saves you some scares. It's the rehearsal room before going on stage.
What many companies don't know is that each staging is a full copy of your database. If your system weighs 20 GB, each staging you have open is another 20 GB database someone has to host.
Why this shows up on your bill: Odoo.sh bills each staging environment as a separate line item, month after month, whether you use it or not. It's very common to find companies paying for two or three stagings their consultant opened a year ago for a test and nobody ever closed.
3. Gigabytes: the disk that never stops filling up
Here's the part that generates the most surprise bills, and the one the fewest people understand.
Your system stores two things: data (customers, invoices, journal entries, products) and files (PDFs, images, attachments, emails). Data grows slowly. Files grow nonstop, and they're what fills the disk.
In Panama there's a multiplier that doesn't exist in other countries: electronic invoicing. Every invoice you issue generates, at minimum, a signed XML and a PDF with the CUFE. And those files can't be deleted: they're the legal record of the operation.
Let's run the numbers for a mid-sized company:
| Item | Approximate |
|---|---|
| Invoices issued per month | 1,500 |
| Size of each invoice (XML + PDF) | ~150 KB |
| Monthly growth from invoices alone | ~225 MB |
| Annual growth from invoices alone | ~2.7 GB |
Add to that the incoming emails with attachments, product images, PDF quotes, the receipts the team uploads to the chatter and the change history Odoo keeps for every record. A company that started with 5 GB can be at 25 GB three years later without doing anything unusual. Just working.
Why this shows up on your bill: Odoo.sh includes a fixed amount of storage and charges for each additional GB every month. Since the disk grows every day, so does the extra charge. That's why the bill "changes on its own": it's not a mistake, it's your company operating.
4. How to tell how much you're overpaying
Three things you can check today, without technical help:
- How many stagings you have open. Go into your Odoo.sh dashboard and count the staging branches. If there's one nobody has touched in three months, close it. That's money saved directly.
- How big your database is and how much of it is files. The same dashboard shows usage. If files are more than 70% of the total, the growth will keep going.
- How many active users you have per worker. If it's over 25 per worker and your team complains about slowness, now you know why.
And three things that cut usage without losing anything you're legally required to keep:
- Don't store the body of incoming emails if your team already has them in their corporate email. Just the record that they arrived.
- Compress product images before uploading them. A 4 MB phone photo can be brought down to 200 KB without anyone noticing the difference on screen.
- Purge duplicate attachments. Odoo has tools for this and a consultant can do it in an afternoon.
5. When the problem is no longer about tuning
Everything above helps you pay a fair price within Odoo.sh. But there comes a point where tuning isn't enough anymore, and it's easy to recognize:
- You need three or more workers and each one is billed separately.
- Your database is over 50 GB and the monthly storage charge is already a serious line on the bill.
- You want a permanent staging for your development team and it costs as much as a part-time employee.
- Your operation is in Panama and every click travels to a server in Europe or the United States.
At that point, the question is no longer how to lower your Odoo.sh bill. It's whether Odoo.sh is still the right place for your system.
For that kind of company there's another way to do it: a dedicated, managed server with Odoo installed and ready, where the workers, the staging and the disk space are yours and aren't billed per unit. You pay a fixed monthly rate for the entire server, with backups, monitoring and local support in Panama included. If your database grows 10 GB this year, the price doesn't change. If you need another staging, you open it.
At VALTRIOM we offer exactly that under the VTGO PaaS Odoo line: managed servers from $129 a month, with Panama's electronic invoicing already integrated. It's not for everyone. It's for the company that already knows how many workers it needs and is tired of being charged for them one by one.
If you want to know whether your case calls for tuning or a change, write to us with the size of your database and your number of users. We'll tell you on a call, no strings attached.
VALTRIOM is an Odoo partner in Panama. This article describes Odoo.sh's public pricing model as of the publication date; prices and terms are set by Odoo S.A. and may change.