Billing terms

1. Plans

Each environment of your projects is billed on its own, as a project of its own: it has its own plan, its own credit and its own free quota. Your organization's payment account holds only what pays — its cards, its billing details and its bank transfers.

Free. Every environment starts on the Free plan. Each of its items has the free quota in the table below, every calendar month (UTC). An item used up is stopped for the rest of the month — traffic is slowed instead, never stopped. Machines and databases of a paid size are not open to it. Until one of your organization's environments has paid a top-up, a person opens at most 2 projects of 2 environments each; a project or an environment deleted counts until the end of the calendar month (UTC).

Pay as you go. An environment is moved to it by its first top-up by card, which loads credit for it ahead, in US dollars (one by bank transfer loads it when the transfer arrives, and you then move the environment). It then uses its own free quota every month; what it uses past it is priced at the table below and taken from its own credit as it is used, every few minutes. There is no monthly fee and no bill afterwards. Paid sizes are open to it while its credit is over nothing and its month is under its limit. One environment running out of credit, or reaching its limit, holds no other.

2. Prices

Prices are in US dollars and do not include tax. An amount is rounded down to the millionth of a dollar. A month's largest is used for what is stored (storage, cache, images, backups) and for monthly active users and concurrent connections. The models of Palbase AI on Palbase's own provider keys are their provider's price and 10%; a project's own key is its provider's to bill. Requests, push notifications and email, SMS and WhatsApp sent through your own provider are not charged.

We may change prices with 30 days' notice by email to the organization's owners and admins. A change never reaches usage before it takes effect.

3. Top-ups, tax and invoices

A top-up is of one environment, and is $10 or more. The first one is taken on Stripe's payment page, which asks for your card, your billing address and, for a business, its VAT number; the card is saved for your organization. Tax is added on top as the law of your billing address requires, calculated by Stripe Tax; a VAT-registered business in the EU is invoiced under the reverse charge. Stripe, our payment processor, emails an invoice for every top-up, naming its environment.

Bank transfers. You can top up an environment by bank transfer: you get an invoice with bank details of your organization's own, and the environment gets the amount when the transfer arrives. What your transfers paid past their invoices stays with your payment account: it is not credit and is spent on nothing by itself, but pays the next top-up of any of your environments first, when it covers the whole of it. It is yours: we return it to the account it came from when you ask, and Stripe returns there what is left of it 75 days after it arrived.

Automatic top-up. By saving your card you authorize us to charge it, without asking again, for the automatic top-ups you set in Studio for each environment: when its credit comes under your threshold, by the amount you set, at most once an hour, never more than its monthly limit still needs if you set one. It is on by default for each environment ($20 when its credit is under $5) and you can change or turn it off at any time in Studio's Billing page. It is taken from your default card, or from what your bank transfers left when that covers it; if a charge is declined, your other cards are tried, then we try once a day for the next two days and email the organization's owners and admins each time. Top-ups are charged in US dollars; your bank may convert them.

4. Credit

Credit can be spent for 12 months from when it was loaded; what is left of it then expires. Credit is not money held for you and earns no interest. It is spent on its own environment only. An owner or an admin of your organization may move it to another environment of the same organization, all of it or a part, each part keeping its expiry; it cannot be moved to another organization or paid out. An environment deleted keeps its credit until it is purged, 7 days after it was deleted: move it before then, as Studio offers when you delete it, or it is lost.

Refunds. A top-up is not refunded, except where we charged you in error or the payment was not authorized by the card's holder. If you are a consumer in the European Union or the European Economic Area, you may withdraw from a top-up within 14 days of making it by writing to us: the credit is available at once, so you ask us to start the service immediately, and we refund the part of that top-up you have not used — wherever it was moved within your organization.

When an environment's credit runs out. You never owe us a debt. What it pays for stops: its machines and databases of a paid size sleep, and it is held to the free quotas, as on the Free plan; your other environments go on. Usage measured in the few minutes before it stopped is taken from its next top-up; what it uses after it, within the free quotas, is not charged. The data of what stopped is kept for at least 90 days, and before any of it is deleted we email the owners 30, 7 and 1 day ahead. A top-up brings it back.

5. Your controls

For each environment you can set a monthly limit — at it, the environment is held to the free quotas until the month ends while the others go on — move it to the Free plan, or freeze it: its requests are refused, its machines and databases stop, its data is kept, and only what it stores is charged. What each environment used and was charged this month is on the Usage page, and item by item as CSV. We email the owners and admins when an environment's credit comes under the days of spend they choose (at most once a day), when it runs out, when its automatic top-up is declined and when its month reaches its limit, what happens at once to several environments in one email; and each environment's own webhooks are told the same, with no amount.

6. Disputes, misuse and ending

If a payment is disputed with the card's bank, the credit it brought is taken off — from the environment it topped up, and from wherever it was moved — and given back if the dispute is decided in your favour. A refund or a dispute turns that environment's automatic top-up off until you turn it on again. We may suspend an organization that misuses Palbase, harms others or breaks the law. You may stop using Palbase at any time; deleting the organization ends these terms, and what is left of its environments' credit expires with it unless a refund above applies.

We keep the records of your payments and invoices for as long as accounting law requires. These terms are governed by the law of Estonia; if you are a consumer, the protections of the country you live in still apply. We may change these terms with 30 days' notice by email; the version you accepted is recorded with your account.