> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.dairo.app/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Credits & billing

> How the prepaid credits wallet works: what fills it, what draws from it, the exact usage rates, spend caps, and where your invoices live.

Dairo bills in two layers. Your **plan** is a flat monthly subscription that
carries the allowances (inboxes, domains, monthly emails, storage) and a monthly
grant of usage credits. Your **credits wallet** is a prepaid USD balance that
pays for metered usage — voice calls, AI compute, and speech synthesis — at the
per-unit rates below. Sending and receiving email is covered by your plan's
monthly allowance and does not draw credits.

## How credits reach your wallet

| Source                 | Amount                            | When                 |
| ---------------------- | --------------------------------- | -------------------- |
| Plan grant — Developer | \$10                              | Every paid month     |
| Plan grant — Startup   | \$75                              | Every paid month     |
| Plan grant — Scale     | \$200                             | Every paid month     |
| Trial grant            | up to \$10                        | Once, at trial start |
| Starter pack           | $10 + a bonus between $1 and \$50 | One-time offer       |
| Top-up                 | Any amount, $5–$5,000             | Whenever you choose  |

Top-ups and the starter pack are one-time purchases from the dashboard's
billing page; the wallet is credited the moment the payment lands. Refunded
purchases are debited back out of the wallet.

## What draws from credits

| Usage                            | Rate                                                            |
| -------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Voice calls — AI leg             | from 4¢ per started minute (by voice tier)                      |
| Voice calls — telephony leg      | by destination, e.g. US from 1.2¢/min, DE mobile from 4.62¢/min |
| AI compute — `claude-haiku-4-5`  | $2 per 1M input tokens, $10 per 1M output tokens                |
| AI compute — `claude-sonnet-4-6` | $6 per 1M input tokens, $30 per 1M output tokens                |
| Dairo-TTS                        | 5¢ per 1,000 characters                                         |

Metered work is priced from what actually ran: an AI generation settles from the
model's real token usage, a call from its real duration. Before the work starts,
Dairo places a **hold** on your wallet for the worst-case price (a call's full
duration cap, a generation's `maxTokens` ceiling); when it finishes, the exact
amount is charged and the rest of the hold is released. Your wallet therefore
shows both a balance and an available figure — available is what's not currently
held by in-flight work.

<Note>
  If your available balance can't cover the worst case, the action is rejected
  up front with the stable error code `insufficient_credits` — a call never rings,
  and a generation never runs, on credit it can't pay for.
</Note>

## Spend caps

You can put a hard daily ceiling on metered spend, independent of your balance:

```bash theme={null}
curl -X PUT https://api.dairo.app/v1/budgets \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DAIRO_API_KEY" \
  -d '{ "scope": "account", "limits": { "maxSpendPerDayCents": 2000 } }'
```

With that cap in place, any call or generation that would push the trailing
24-hour spend (settled usage plus everything currently held) past \$20 is
rejected with the stable error code `spend_cap_reached`, and a
`budget.tripped` event is delivered to your webhooks. The cap is enforced
atomically — parallel requests can't slip past it together.

Volume budgets (`maxSendsPerDay`, `maxNewRecipientsPerHour`,
`hardStopOnComplaint`) live on the same endpoint and gate email and letter
sending the same way.

## Invoices and receipts

Subscriptions and credit purchases are processed by Stripe. Every payment
produces a Stripe invoice — top-ups included — and VAT or sales tax is applied
on the invoice according to your billing address (enter a VAT ID at checkout
for a reverse-charge B2B invoice where that applies). The dashboard's billing
page lists every invoice with a downloadable PDF, and the Stripe customer
portal lets you change plan, cancel at period end, or update your payment
method. Wallet activity (grants, top-ups, holds, settlements, refunds) is
itemized in the same place.

## Reading your usage

Your live allowances and usage come from `whoami` under `limits` and `usage`;
the dashboard's usage page shows the same numbers with the wallet balance and
recent ledger alongside. The figures your bill is built from are never a
surprise.