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

Billing is in the side panel, under Account.

1. Click Billing in the side panel.

Or open Billing directly.

You land on the Overview tab. Three tabs sit under the page title - Overview, Invoices, Transactions - and at the top right are a refresh button and Add credit. That is the whole page.

The console's Home page also carries a Billing card showing Available credit, with a Manage billing button that brings you 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, snapshots and backups are free.
• The running total shows on the Overview tab as Usage this month, counted from the 1st of the calendar month.
• 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. A dialog of the same name opens 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 opens with four cards:

• Available credit - what is left on the account, with a rough runway underneath ("~42 days at current usage"). It turns red below $3, the floor for creating anything.
• Usage this month - what you have run up so far, over the period named underneath.
• Pending transactions - top-ups that have not completed yet.
• Pending invoices - invoices your balance has not covered yet.

Under the cards, Recent activity lists your five most recent transactions.

Invoices

Click the Invoices tab. One row per month, with Date, Invoice ID, Amount and Status, where status is Paid or Pending.

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, with Date, Transaction ID, Amount and Status, where status is Completed or Pending. A payment Stripe has not confirmed yet sits at Pending until it clears. Ids are shortened to fit the row; clicking one copies the full id.

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 Usage alerts, set Low credit alert to the balance you want warning at, in dollars.
4. Set High usage alert to the month's usage figure you want warning at.
5. Under Delivery, optionally paste a Webhook URL - Slack, Discord, or any endpoint that accepts JSON - to get alerts in your team chat instead of hunting through email.
6. 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. 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, a dunning ladder starts, with an email at every step: first a warning naming the exact stop date; 5 business days later your pods are stopped; 5 more business days later each pod is backed up and then deleted to free the capacity. The backups are kept, and a pod whose backup does not complete is not deleted. 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

You can read stats, list invoices and transactions, and open a checkout session from the billing API.