Payment methods & wallet

How you pay Bird comes down to two things: a payment method (typically a card) and your wallet — a shared prepaid balance that charges are drawn from. This page covers managing both, so payments go through smoothly and sending is never interrupted by a billing hiccup.

Everything here lives in the dashboard: open Billing and payments. It's managed by organization owners and billing admins.

Payment methods

Open the Payment Methods tab to add a card or update the one on file. A few practical notes:

Keep at least one valid method on file. Plan charges and wallet top-ups are made against it, so an expired card is the most common cause of a failed payment.
Updating a card replaces it for future charges — past invoices and transactions are unaffected.
If a payment fails, it isn't a dead end: failed payments are retried and handled according to your plan's terms, and your billing notification addresses are informed so someone can fix the card before it matters. To check or set those addresses, open Billing and payments — point them at a team alias, not one person's inbox.

The wallet

You have one wallet — a prepaid balance shared across your workspaces. Charges flow out of it, and top-ups flow into it. There's never a question of which workspace's balance pays for what: it's all one pot.

You can see the current balance any time in the Wallet tab.

Topping up

To add funds, open the Wallet tab and start a top-up: choose an amount, confirm the payment method, and submit. A successful top-up looks like this:

The payment is charged to your payment method.
Your wallet balance increases by the top-up amount — you'll see the new balance in the Wallet tab right away.
The top-up appears as a credit in the Transaction History tab, alongside every other charge and credit on the wallet.

That Transaction History tab is the full ledger of your wallet — every top-up, plan charge, and usage charge in order — so it's the place to reconcile any balance question.

Auto top-up

Where available, you can configure auto top-up in the Wallet tab: pick a threshold and a top-up amount, and when your balance drops below the threshold, Bird automatically tops it up from your payment method. If you send continuously, this is the simplest way to make sure sending is never interrupted by a balance that quietly ran dry — no one has to remember to top up manually.

Automatic top-ups appear in the Transaction History tab like any other top-up, so the ledger stays complete.

Stay ahead of a low balance

Two habits keep billing from ever becoming an operational problem:

Set billing notification emails. Your organization's billing notification addresses receive low-balance warnings before the wallet runs out, along with invoice notifications and plan-change confirmations. A warning that arrives at a team alias gets acted on; one that lands in a departed employee's inbox does not.
Glance at Transaction History when something looks off. Every movement of money is in that ledger, timestamped — between it and the Invoices tab, you can account for every cent.

What's next

Usage & invoices — what you're paying for, and where the invoices live.
Developers can read the wallet and transaction ledger programmatically — see Billing & usage.