How your billing period works

Almost every billing question turns out to be a question about the period. It is worth two minutes.

Your period is an anniversary month, in UTC

It runs from the day you subscribed, not from the first of the calendar month, and the boundaries are computed in UTC rather than in your local time zone. If you subscribed on the 9th, your periods start on the 9th.

Short months clamp to the last valid day

If your anniversary is the 31st, then in a 30-day month it falls on the 30th, and in February on the 28th — the 29th in a leap year. It never rolls forward into the following month. This is the behaviour that surprises people who subscribe at the end of January, so it is stated rather than left to be discovered.

Allowances reset per period

Included storage, agent sessions and CI-minutes are granted for one period. At the start of the next one you get the full allowance again, and unused allowance does not carry over. Overage prices are quoted per month and settle against the period they were incurred in.

What happens at settlement

1. Usage for the period is aggregated first — all the CI seconds, all the admitted sessions, storage integrated across the days.

2. The aggregate is priced against your plan's included allowance.

3. The result is rounded once, up, to whole currency units.

Aggregating before rounding is the whole point. Rounding per job, or per day, or twice, charges for consumption that did not happen.

A settled period is closed

Once a period has settled, usage cannot be added to it. Usage is recorded idempotently — each reported event carries its own identity, so a retry or a reconnect does not double-count — and that identity is what makes a closed period safe to close.

Mid-period changes

Seat increases prorate into the current period immediately. Seat reductions, downgrades and cancellations take effect at the boundary. Refunds are not automatic, so the boundary is the thing to plan around rather than something to undo afterwards.