Pay As You Go: Metered Billing and Prepaid Credit Packs

Not Every Account Wants a Plan

Our plan tiers — Starter, Pro, Business — are built around a monthly allotment: pay a flat fee, get a bucket of events, overage kicks in if you go past it. That's a good fit for steady, predictable traffic. It's a bad fit for an account that sends a few hundred events one month and a few thousand the next, or a side project that isn't ready to commit to a subscription just to find out if it needs one.

Pay As You Go is for that second case. It's not a fifth tier bolted onto the plan comparison table — it's a different shape entirely: no monthly commitment, no allotment to size correctly in advance, and two ways to actually pay depending on whether you'd rather be billed after the fact or prepay and forget about it.

What's New

• Metered billing — $1.00 per 1,000 events, no base fee, no minimum. You're billed automatically at the end of the month for exactly what you sent, and you can cancel anytime.
• Prepaid credit packs — buy a fixed block of events with no recurring charge at all: Small (10,000 events / $10), Medium (50,000 events / $40), or Large (200,000 events / $120). Larger packs work out cheaper per event, down to $0.60 per 1,000 on the Large pack.
• Credits are consumed oldest-first and stay valid for 12 months from purchase — buying another pack while one is still active doesn't strand or expire the older credits early.
• Enable either mode in one click from Settings → Billing — no ticket, no plan migration, no card required until you actually turn it on.
• A 50,000 events/month hard cap on both modes — Pay As You Go is deliberately scoped for low-to-moderate volume; an account that regularly needs more than that is better served by a subscription plan anyway.

Metered vs. Credits Is a Real Choice, Not Just Two Prices

The two modes aren't just different price curves on the same idea — they trade off differently depending on what you're optimizing for. Metered billing means never thinking about balance: send events, get billed once a month for what you used, done. There's no "running low" state to monitor and nothing to top up. The tradeoff is a variable bill and a card on file that gets charged automatically.

Credit packs invert that. You know the exact ceiling on what you'll spend before you spend it, because you already paid for it — there's no invoice surprise, ever, because there's no invoice. The tradeoff is the opposite of metered's convenience: you're responsible for noticing your balance is getting low and buying another pack before you run out, and unused credits (within their 12-month window) are money you've committed that hasn't been used yet.

Neither is strictly better — a side project with unpredictable traffic that just wants to not think about billing fits metered; a team that wants to hand a fixed budget to whoever's managing spend fits credits. We built both because "which one do you want" is a legitimate question with a legitimate "it depends" answer, not something we could pick a winner on and ship one.

Oldest-First, On Purpose

When credits from more than one pack are active on an account, consumption draws from the oldest batch first. That's not an implementation detail — it's the thing that makes buying a second pack early a safe, boring decision instead of a mildly risky one. Without oldest-first ordering, topping up before you run out could mean the newer credits get burned down while older ones sit untouched toward their 12-month expiry, and you'd lose value you already paid for through no fault of your own. Oldest-first means every credit you buy gets used in the order you bought it, full stop.

Try It

Open Settings → Billing and look for the Pay As You Go section — enable metered billing with one click, or buy a credit pack directly from there. If you want the fuller comparison first, including the breakeven point against a Starter subscription, there's a dedicated walkthrough at /pay-as-you-go.