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Payment methods & wallet

Every charge on Bird (the plan renewal, email overage, each SMS) is drawn from your organization's wallet, a single prepaid balance shared by all your workspaces. A saved card exists to fill that wallet: top-ups, auto top-up, and covering a renewal the balance can't. Understand those two pieces and the rest of billing is just bookkeeping.
Everything here lives on the Billing and payments Overview page: the wallet sidebar shows your available balance and next charge, with rows for auto top-up, the low balance alert, payment methods, and your billing address. It's managed by organization owners and billing admins.

The wallet

The sidebar's headline number is your available balance: what you can spend right now, and the figure every send and purchase is checked against. Usage is charged as it happens, so it moves within seconds of sending and can sit below the total of the charges listed on your Spend page, which only shows charges that have finished settling. Below it, Next charge shows the date and amount of your upcoming renewal, and warns you early if the balance won't cover it.
Two states are worth recognizing:
  • Running low. A dismissible banner appears when you're under your alert threshold, and your billing contacts get an email. Top up before the renewal date and nothing else happens.
  • Empty or negative. Pay-as-you-go products (SMS, WhatsApp) pause when the wallet can't cover them, and a negative balance stops sending entirely until it's paid. Email within your plan's included volume is the exception: that's covered by the plan, not the balance.

Topping up

Add funds on the Overview page opens the top-up flow: pick an amount (the minimum is 15 EUR/USD), confirm, and pay by card. The first time, you'll be asked for your billing address and VAT number. Invoices can't be issued without them, so the flow collects them once and remembers.
A completed top-up shows the new balance immediately, appears as a credit on the Spend page, and gets its own payment receipt (separate from your monthly invoice, which only covers charges).

Paying by bank transfer

If your finance department needs a document before it will release funds, enter the amount in the top-up flow and choose Get a pro forma invoice instead of continuing to payment. Bird issues a pro forma document you can download as a PDF and hand over as-is: it carries Bird's bank details for each currency, the amount, and a reference number in the form PRO-2600001.
Quote that reference number on the transfer. It's how Bird matches your payment to the document, and a transfer that arrives without it takes longer to trace.
Two things to plan around:
  • The wallet isn't credited automatically. A card top-up lands in seconds; a bank transfer is credited after it arrives and is matched, so start the process before you actually need the balance.
  • A pro forma is a request to pay, not a tax invoice. It carries no VAT breakdown and doesn't replace your monthly invoice. Once the transfer is credited you get a payment receipt for it, the same as any other top-up.
The amount follows the same rules as a card top-up: your wallet's currency, and the same 15 EUR/USD minimum. Past documents stay available under Pro formas on the Billing menu, so you can re-download one your finance team has lost without creating another.

Auto top-up

If you send continuously, configure Auto top-up from the wallet sidebar: set a minimum balance and a refill amount, and whenever the balance drops below the minimum, Bird charges your default card for the refill. It's the difference between billing being an operational concern and not: nobody has to remember anything, and pay-as-you-go sending never pauses on a quietly empty wallet.
Automatic top-ups land on the Spend page like any other, so the ledger stays complete. The Low balance alert row is the lighter-touch alternative: no automatic charge, just an email to your billing contacts when the balance crosses your threshold. You can run both: the alert threshold sits below the auto top-up one, as a second line of defense for a failing card.

Payment methods

The Payment method row lists your saved cards. The default card is the one that matters: it backs auto top-up and covers renewal shortfalls (see Plan changes & renewals for how a renewal splits between wallet and card).
  • Adding a card verifies it without charging it. Some banks show a temporary authorization that reverses automatically.
  • Make default switches which card future charges use; past transactions are unaffected.
  • A card that declined its last charge is flagged in the list. Replace it promptly: a stale default card plus an empty wallet is the one combination that leads to the failed-renewal path.
  • You can't remove the default card while other cards exist; make another card the default first.

Billing details

Your billing address and VAT number feed directly onto your invoices. The Billing address row on the Overview page edits them, and can set a separate invoice address if your billing entity differs from your registered one. The Settings page holds the billing contact (the primary email billing and account notifications go to) and lists every subscription your organization holds: the plan, add-ons like dedicated IPs and phone numbers, and any scheduled changes.
The billing Settings page: the billing contact email and the subscriptions table with product, status, quantity, and current period
Point the billing contact at a team alias, not a person. Low-balance warnings, payment failures, invoices, and plan-change confirmations all go there, and every one of them is only useful if someone reads it in time.

Next steps