Billing & credit

MicroApps runs on prepaid credit. You top up an amount, usage accrues by the hour, and nothing recharges on its own. No autorenew, no monthly contract, no surprise card charge.

Finding the Billing page

Click Billing in the side panel, under Account, or open Billing directly. A refresh button and Add credit sit at the top right; three tabs - Overview, Invoices, Transactions - sit under the title, and you arrive on Overview.

The console's Home page carries the same numbers in a smaller Billing card, with a Usage this month, in full link back here.

How charges work

• Every pod accrues an hourly rate for its compute size, and a second one for its storage. Domains, SSL, networks, firewalls and snapshots are free. Backups are free until paid backups start; from then each new one accrues by the hour for its size, per GB a month (see the pricing page).
• The running total shows on the Overview tab as Usage this month, counted from the 1st of the calendar month.
• At 02:00 UTC on the 2nd of the following month we issue an invoice for that usage, email it to the account owner, and settle it from your credit. Every invoice downloads as a PDF.

Your balance moves when an invoice settles, not hour by hour. Sit watching Available credit for an hourly tick down and you will be there a long time: accrual writes usage rows, settlement is what deducts credit.

Stopping a pod does not stop its charges - the compute and disk stay reserved for you either way. Delete the pod to stop its meter.

You need at least $3 of credit to create anything billable - a pod, domain, network, firewall, snapshot, backup or mailbox - and to clone or restore a pod. For actual rates, see the pricing page; the billing model explains what is billed and what is free.

Adding credit

1. Open Billing, as above.
2. Click Add credit, at the top right, or the one inside the Available credit card. Either opens the same Add credit dialog over the page.
3. Type the amount into Amount (USD). Whole dollars, from $3 to $10,000. There are no fixed packages - pick what suits you.
4. Click Proceed to Payment. The console hands you to Stripe Checkout in the same tab.
5. Pay there.

Stripe returns you to a Payment successful page naming the amount added, with a Back to Billing button, and your credit is on the account. If the page reads Payment received instead, the payment went through and the credit follows within a few minutes. Change your mind at Stripe and you land on Payment canceled, with no charge made.

We never see your card details - Stripe handles the payment end to end.

No auto-recharge

Credit only goes up when you top it up. If you would rather not think about it, add a comfortable buffer and set a low-credit alert (below).

Reading your balance and usage

The Overview tab leads with two cards side by side:

• Available credit - the balance in large type, with a rough runway underneath ("~42 days at current usage", or "No usage yet" on a quiet account) and its own Add credit button. The figure turns red below $3, the floor for creating anything.
• Usage this month - what you have run up so far, over the period named beside it ("September 1 - today").

Under those, two smaller tiles count Pending invoices (with their total, and "settles when your balance covers it") and Pending transactions, then Recent activity lists your five most recent transactions.

Invoices

Click the Invoices tab. One row per month, with Date, Invoice ID, Amount and Status. Status reads Paid once the invoice has been settled from your credit; an invoice your balance has not covered yet stays pending and is retried every five minutes.

At the right of each row are two icons: the eye (View invoice) opens the PDF inside the console, and the download arrow (Download PDF) saves it. Click an invoice id to copy it, which beats retyping it into a support ticket.

Transactions

Click the Transactions tab. Every top-up and every credit our team adds, with Date, Description, Transaction ID, Amount and Status. Description reads Top-up for credit you bought through Stripe, or Credit from support for credit our team added to your account.

Status	Meaning
Completed	The credit is on your account. For a top-up, Stripe took the payment.
Pending	You started a checkout that Stripe has not confirmed yet.
Expired	You left the checkout without paying. A session is only good for about half an hour. Nothing was charged; start a new top-up.

Ids are shortened to fit the row; clicking one copies the full id. On a phone the Transaction ID column is hidden to make room.

Alerts (they only notify)

MicroApps never tops up or charges you automatically, so alerts are how you stay ahead of an empty balance. They live in account settings, not on the Billing page:

1. Click Settings in the side panel, or open Account settings.
2. Click the Notifications tab.
3. Under Delivery, optionally paste a Webhook URL - Slack, Discord, or any endpoint that accepts JSON. Email to the account owner is always on; the webhook is extra.
4. Under Usage alerts, set Low credit alert to the balance you want warning at, and High usage alert to the month's usage figure you want warning at. Both in dollars.
5. Click Save changes.

Both start at 0, which means off, and 0 is how you turn one back off later. Nothing warns you about a thinning balance until you put a number in, so do it now rather than the morning after.

Monitoring alerts (domain uptime, resource and mailbox usage) are emailed to the account owner and delivered to the same webhook, and while one lasts it is listed under Needs attention on the console's Home page. Crossing a threshold sends a notification. That is all it does; it never moves money.

When credit runs low

Set the alerts above so you see it coming. If credit runs out:

• New billable actions (create, clone, restore) are blocked until you are back above $3, with Insufficient credit. You need at least $3 on your account to proceed. Nothing that is already running is touched at that moment: an empty balance stops you starting things, it does not stop what exists.
• Your monthly invoice waits as pending until your balance covers it. Top-ups of any size are accepted while an invoice is pending - a top-up smaller than the invoice is not rejected. Each invoice settles in full the moment the balance covers it, oldest first, and settlement runs within minutes of a top-up.

If an invoice stays unpaid for more than an hour, a dunning ladder starts, with an email at every step:

Step	When	What happens
Warning	An invoice has stayed pending	Email naming the exact date your pods will stop.
Pods stopped	2 business days after the warning	Every running pod is stopped. Storage is untouched.
Pods deleted	3 more business days	Each pod is backed up, then deleted to free the capacity.

Deadlines skip weekends, so the date in the email is always a weekday. The backups are kept, and a pod whose backup does not complete is not deleted. Once paid backups start, each of these final backups is free and is deleted 60 days after it was taken, unless you keep it. Paying at any point stops the ladder: pods we stopped are restarted automatically, and deleted pods can be restored from their backups.

Do it from the API

Reading the balance and this month's usage needs billing:read:

curl https://cloud-api.microapps.io/api/billing/stats \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MICROAPPS_API_KEY"

{
  "availableCredit": 24.5,
  "totalUsage": 3.12
}

Invoices and transactions need the same permission; opening a checkout session needs Make payments (billing:pay). The full set is in the billing API.