How pay as you go works

Pay as you go is a balance you fund before you spend it. While it holds money, a request that arrives after your credits are gone is rendered rather than refused, and the cost comes off the balance. Nothing is billed afterwards and nothing is owed, because the money is already there. It sits alongside a plan rather than replacing one. A subscriber uses it as the safety net under a busy month, and an account with no plan uses it as the whole arrangement. Subscriptions from $0.002 per render. Without one, $0.05 per render, the same rate standalone mockup APIs charge on a paid plan. This page therefore describes the highest per-render rate on the account rather than the usual rate.

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Adding a balance

The Pay as you go card on the Billing page shows the balance and the button that adds to it. A single top up runs from $5 to $500. Your first balance purchase is refundable for 30 days on whatever you have not spent. The card you pay with is kept, and that first purchase also arms automatic top up: when the balance falls below $3, another $10 goes on it. The payment page states this before it charges you, and the switch, the threshold and the amount are yours to change or turn off on the billing page afterwards. A threshold has to be at least $3 and an automatic amount at least $10, which is what keeps the reload landing before the balance reaches zero.

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What it costs

With a plan in place the balance is drawn at a rate derived from that plan instead of from the catalogue. The usage tab on the billing page prints that rate per render beside the balance, so the figure you are spending at is always the one on the screen. With no plan in place, the balance is spent per operation instead. One finished image is $0.05, whether it came from a PSD render, a photo mockup render, a generated image or a background removal. Creating a photo mockup from a product photograph is $0.10, because it produces a reusable template rather than a picture. Setup work that produces no image, such as adjusting a mask or moving a print area, costs nothing.

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When the balance runs out

The API answers 402. An account that has funded a balance and spent it reads error_code as insufficient_balance, and the response carries an action that leads straight to the top up. An account that has never been funded reads credits_exhausted instead, and the way forward there is a card or a plan. Neither is worth retrying: Errors covers which statuses are transient and which ask you to fix the billing state first. A render that never produced an image is refunded to whatever paid for it, the balance included.

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Reading the balance from code

Retrieve the current account reports usage.prepaid_balance next to the credit counters, so a queue that renders unattended can check both before it starts a long batch.