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Plans and pricing

Each Bird product has its own plan. You can stay on pay-as-you-go for SMS, choose a paid Email plan, and add a Realtime plan, and each choice affects only that product's rates and limits. Your plans, wallet, and invoices belong to your organization.

Open Billing and payments > Overview to see your current plans under Product plans, with each plan's renewal date and status. Select Choose plan or Manage plan on a product's row to open its plans page. Organization Owners and Billing admins manage billing access.

How product plans work

A product without a plan runs on pay-as-you-go: you pay the published rate for each use from your wallet, under the product's default rate limits. Choosing a plan for that product gives it the benefits the plan lists, such as a higher sending speed, more concurrent calls, a lower usage rate, or included capacity.

Plans for different products are independent. Upgrading Email does not change your SMS prices or Voice limits, and a payment problem with one plan does not affect the others. Each product has its own tiers (for example Startup, Growth, and Scale), and a higher tier offers more of that product's benefits.

Every plan is one of two kinds, shown on its plan card:

  • A funding plan adds a monthly deposit to your wallet.
  • A capacity plan buys included usage and adds nothing to your wallet.

Current prices, deposits, and benefits for each plan are on the pricing page and on each product's plans page in the dashboard.

Funding plans: a monthly deposit you can spend anywhere

Paid Email, SMS, Voice, WhatsApp, and Apple Messages plans are funding plans. You commit to a monthly payment, and after each payment succeeds Bird adds the full amount to your organization's wallet. In return, the product gets the plan's higher limits and, where the plan lists one, its lower usage rate.

The deposit is ordinary wallet balance:

  • Spend it on any product. A deposit made through your SMS plan can pay for email, voice calls, WhatsApp messages, or a phone number rental.
  • Unused balance carries forward. Nothing expires at renewal, and the next month's deposit is added on top.
  • Usage is charged from the first message. A funding plan includes no free messages or minutes. Each use is charged from the wallet at the plan's rate.

A funding plan is paid by card or another instant payment method, separately from your wallet. Existing wallet balance does not reduce the plan payment. The payment itself becomes balance you spend later, so no tax is added when you pay the deposit; tax applies when the balance pays for taxable usage.

Capacity plans: a fee for included usage

A capacity plan's fee buys a defined amount of capacity for its period, such as concurrent connections and daily messages on Realtime. The fee adds nothing to your wallet. Before you pay, the dashboard shows the fee and the tax on it, and the paid fee appears on your invoice.

Realtime plans and the Email Free plan are capacity plans. When a capacity plan's included usage runs out, the plan's terms decide what happens next. The Email Free plan stops sending at its limits until the counter resets, and a Realtime plan refuses connections and messages beyond its limits. Moving to a larger plan raises those limits.

What a higher tier raises

The benefits differ by product. Each plan's card lists them, and the comparison table on the pricing page shows every tier side by side:

  • Sending speed. Rate limits such as email_send, sms_send, whatsapp_send, and amb_send rise with each tier. Higher tiers can also raise API, verification, and message-status limits.
  • Voice capacity. Voice plans raise how many calls you can have in progress at once and how many new calls you can start per second. Larger Voice plans also raise the maximum daily voice spend.
  • Included capacity. Realtime plans raise concurrent connections and daily messages.
  • Account resources. Some plans raise counts such as sending domains, dedicated IPs, mailboxes, and webhook endpoints.
  • Usage rates. Some plans lower the rate per use. The pricing page shows the rate each plan charges.

When you hold plans for several products, each plan raises its own product's limits. A limit that more than one plan can raise, such as the API retrieve limit, uses the highest value among your plans. Webhook endpoint allowances from each plan add up. Rate limits explains how the effective limit is resolved.

If you are regularly close to a limit, compare the next tier's value for that limit on the product's plans page, then upgrade. The change applies after its payment succeeds; see Plan changes & renewals.

Email plans

Every organization has an Email plan. The Free plan includes 1,000 emails per month, capped at 50 per day (the daily counter resets at midnight UTC), with no card required. It has no overage: Bird rejects new sends at the daily cap until midnight UTC and at the monthly cap until your next period starts, or until a paid plan takes effect.

Paid Email plans are funding plans. They have no monthly email allowance or plan volume cap. Every email is charged from the wallet at the plan's published rate per 1,000, and higher tiers raise the sending limits. Once the wallet has no balance or credit left, new email is refused until you add funds. Dedicated IP add-ons and IP pools are available on Growth and Scale.

Legacy Email plans. Organizations that subscribed before the current Email plans keep their plan, with its included allowance, overage terms, and renewal from the wallet, until they choose to switch. A legacy plan card shows a Legacy plan badge. The Email plans page shows the timing and payment for a switch before you confirm it.

On a legacy plan with overage enabled, sends beyond the included volume are metered per 1,000 emails and charged from the wallet as they accrue, with any remainder charged when the period ends. Overage needs funds: once the wallet has no balance or credit left, sends beyond the included volume are rejected until you add funds. A legacy plan can also set an overage ceiling, a multiple of its included volume, and Bird rejects sends beyond it until the period resets or you change plans. A legacy renewal that is not paid by the renewal date moves your organization to the Email Free plan; see Plan changes & renewals.

Pay-as-you-go usage

Usage is charged from the wallet as you send, at your plan's rate or the published standard rate:

  • SMS is priced per segment by destination country and, in some countries, by carrier. Bird deducts its own charge while processing the message; where a carrier surcharge applies, that is deducted when the message is delivered.
  • WhatsApp is priced per message by template category and destination country: Bird's fee while processing, Meta's share on delivery. A WhatsApp plan does not change Meta's share.
  • Voice is priced per minute by direction and destination.
  • Verification (one-time passcodes) has no separate fee: you pay the normal channel cost of each message it sends.

These products need enough available wallet balance or credit for the charge. Prepaid organizations must top up, or rely on a funding plan's deposits, when the balance runs out. Current per-country rates are on the pricing page; organization usage appears on the Usage page.

Add-on subscriptions: numbers and dedicated IPs

Dedicated phone numbers and dedicated IPs are monthly subscriptions paid from the wallet, including balance from a funding plan's deposit. They appear in the subscriptions table under Billing and payments > Subscriptions and as separate invoice line items. How many dedicated IPs you can hold depends on your Email plan.

Some number orders and priced alphanumeric sender registrations also carry a one-time setup fee. Check the applicable product, country, and quoted charges before estimating a total; the monthly subscription or per-message rate does not establish whether setup is free.

Contract terms and minimum spend

For volumes, limits, or commercial terms beyond the published plans, contact sales. A contract can set negotiated rates and an agreed minimum spend on invoice terms, where eligible usage counts toward the minimum and any shortfall is invoiced. A credit limit lets you incur charges within approved terms; it is not a deposit and does not create a minimum spend by itself.

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