Billing & usage
Billing is organization-scoped: your plan, wallet, and invoice stream belong to the organization. This page covers how billing shapes an integration: how usage is metered, how to read the current picture, and how your plan tier sets the operational limits your integration runs against. For account operations (pricing details, payment methods, tax), see the Knowledge base: Plans & pricing and Usage, spend & invoices.
Billing is managed by people, not by integrations. Every billing operation is gated by the org:billing scope, an organization-role scope that cannot be granted to a workspace API key, so no bk_* key can read usage, top up the wallet, or change a plan. Owners and billing admins do that work in the Billing and payments section of the dashboard; see Users, teams & roles for who holds the role. The plan, product, and price catalogs are the exception: they need no authentication, they publish the pricing on this site, and the CLI and MCP can read the plan catalog directly. This guide therefore explains what billing does to your integration, and names the dashboard page that shows each number. Those pages (Overview, Usage, Invoices, Spend, and Settings) are covered in the Knowledge base articles linked throughout.
Plans and tiers
Your organization subscribes to one plan. Your current subscription, upgrades, and cancellation live on the Billing overview. Each plan carries a tier (free, startup, growth, or enterprise), and the tier is what your integration feels operationally:
- Included sending volume. Each plan includes a monthly allowance of email sends, metered per recipient: a message to three recipients consumes three. On paid plans, sends beyond the allowance are metered as overage up to a hard ceiling; past the ceiling, sends are rejected with a limit error until the period resets. The Free plan has no overage at all: it stops at its monthly and daily caps. Allowances, caps, and the overage ceiling are in Plans & pricing.
- Rate-limit ceilings scale with plan. Rate limits start from a base value, your plan replaces it with a higher one, and a per-organization override replaces both, so higher plans raise the send and read ceilings. The model, every group's base rate, and the headers are described in Rate limits.
- Resource limits. Caps such as how many sending domains, IP pools, and dedicated IPs your organization can hold are set per plan and adjustable per organization. If you hit one, contact support rather than working around it.
Upgrades apply immediately, making the full new allowance available for the rest of the current period. Downgrades and cancellations take effect at the end of the current billing period. See Plan changes & renewals for the failed-payment sequence and other timing rules. Design integrations to handle errors when an account exceeds its allowance.
Usage metering
Every send is metered against your organization's current billing period. The dashboard's Usage page shows the live picture for each product, over the window that product is measured on: the plan period for metered email, the calendar month for pay-as-you-go. Products bill one of two ways, and the difference is what your integration feels:
- Metered products have an included allowance on your plan (email sends). The page shows how much of the allowance you have consumed and how far past it you are, so you can see an overage building before it bills.
- Pay-as-you-go products are billed per use against a rate card (SMS, WhatsApp). A message can draw on the wallet twice: Bird's own fee when the send is processed, and a third-party fee (a carrier surcharge on SMS, Meta's share on WhatsApp) when the message is delivered. Read the split per message from cost on the SMS or WhatsApp message: transaction_amount is Bird's charge and passthrough_amount the third-party fee.
The page covers every product with a subscription or usage in the current period, and charts the per-day, per-country, and per-sending-domain splits for any one of them.
The wallet
Each organization has a wallet: a shared prepaid balance that every charge flows through. Plan renewals, overage, and pay-as-you-go sends all debit the wallet; a saved card exists to fill it (top-ups, auto top-up, and covering a renewal the balance can't). The dashboard's Spend page is the full ledger of credits and charges, so every wallet movement is accounted for in one place, and each top-up payment that settles produces a durable receipt you can download as a PDF from the same section.
Operationally, the wallet is a dependency of pay-as-you-go sending: SMS and WhatsApp sends are rejected when the balance can't cover them. SMS is refused at the API with a 402; a WhatsApp send is accepted and then rejected once Bird tries to charge it. A delivery-time fee the balance cannot cover is skipped rather than rejected, so the message still reaches its recipient. For transactional volume, configure auto top-up and a low-balance alert on the Billing overview, or monitor and alert on your side. Payment methods and wallet covers both dashboard controls. Low-balance warnings and payment-failure notices go to the organization owners. Invoice emails go to the organization's billing notification list when one is set, and fall back to the organization owner otherwise. Set that list under Settings > Organization. Use a monitored team alias for it so billing mail does not depend on one person's inbox.
Invoices
Invoices are issued per organization, one per calendar month, and listed on the dashboard's Invoices page, where you can open one for its line items or download it as a PDF. Invoices reflect the same metering the Usage page shows: your plan's recurring charge plus any metered overage and pay-as-you-go spend for the period. For how invoices are structured, statuses, and payment timing, see Usage, spend & invoices in the Knowledge base.
Next steps
- Rate limits: the base/tier/override model your tier feeds into
- Plans & pricing: what each plan includes, overage, and pay-as-you-go pricing
- Plan changes & renewals: upgrade/cancel timing and the failed-payment sequence
- Users, teams & roles: who can manage billing (org:billing)
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