Billing

Billing

Overview

Billing in Tailglow is managed at the team level. Each team has a billing plan, payment methods, and access to invoices and credit notes. Billing settings are accessible from the Team Settings page under the Billing tab.

Free server trial

An eligible new account can start one server in its team’s first project without a payment method. The three-day trial starts when that server first comes up, so time spent waiting for it to start does not count against the trial. Creating another project or team does not renew your account’s trial.

The trial grants the team 72 server-hours of credit: one running server uses one server-hour each hour. Two servers share the same balance and use two server-hours each hour. Server-hours are shared across all projects on the team and stay available until spent. Tailglow staff can extend a trial; an extension adds the matching server-hours and brings back a trial server that was paused.

Included allowances

Every team has these allowances, whether or not it ran a trial:

  • Tailglow AI tokens: a new team starts with 10 million tokens for the Tailglow-provided model. Input, output and cached tokens count; reasoning tokens are included in output tokens, not counted twice. The balance resets each month once your latest invoice is paid, as described below. Your own provider keys are billed by that provider and do not use these tokens.
  • 5 GB-months of storage every month: each monthly invoice includes the first 5 GB-months of storage on every plan. This is a usage allowance, not a 5 GB capacity limit: holding 5 GB for a full month uses 5 GB-months. Included storage that goes unused does not carry over.

The Free this month card on the billing page shows how much of your included storage and Tailglow AI allowance you have used, including usage not yet invoiced. Reading it spends nothing: allowances are deducted when usage is invoiced, and the current estimate already includes them. Tailglow staff can refill your AI tokens to your plan’s monthly allowance.

Trial deadline and payment methods

Without a payment method, the initial server pauses when the three-day trial ends. Billable server time stops at that deadline, even if infrastructure cleanup runs later. Adding a card after the deadline does not make that cleanup gap billable. You have seven more days to add a payment method and resume the paused server; after that, the server is removed.

With a payment method, servers can keep running after the trial deadline and you can add capacity in any project. All running servers draw from the shared server-hour credit. Once it is spent, usage is charged at your team’s normal rate. Manage Servers shows the selected monthly cost. If you have permission to read billing, it also estimates how much longer the team’s available server credit will last at the selected server count.

The server deadline and the credit balances are separate. The deadline controls when a cardless server pauses; it does not expire unused AI or server credits. For the Tailglow-provided model, Pro teams without a payment method need remaining AI credits before each model call. Calls already in progress may finish as credits run out; any excess is covered by Tailglow and will not appear as a later charge. Teams with a payment method, and Enterprise teams, keep using the model after their balance runs out: remaining credits are deducted when invoicing and further usage is billed on the next invoice. Your own provider key bypasses this allowance check entirely.

Credits across billing months

All server runtime is metered, and eligible promotional units are deducted centrally when the invoice is created. A trial crossing a month boundary shares one 72-server-hour balance across both months. Each month’s credited hours use that month’s prorated server rate. Estimates do not spend credits, and retrying an invoice does not spend them again. Included storage comes off first, then promotional credits, then other billing discounts. The invoice shows full metered usage, Included storage, a separate Promotional credit, any negotiated Discount, and the amount due.

When your team’s latest monthly invoice is paid, Enterprise teams receive a reset to 100 million Tailglow AI tokens, including teams that pay by invoice without a saved payment method. Pro teams with a payment method receive a reset to 10 million tokens. This is included, not a prepaid purchase or an additional charge. Unused AI credits, including higher balances, are replaced by the monthly allowance. Usage since the end of the invoiced month counts against it, so paying late never makes usage free. Paying an older invoice after a newer one is issued does not reset the balance, and paying the same invoice again does not reset it twice. Pro teams without a payment method keep their remaining tokens but receive no monthly reset.

Select Tailglow in Chat to use these tokens. The information drawer in Agents settings shows current rates, including the 15% service fee. All teams share one saved Tailglow rate for each billing month. Customer price changes take effect in the next month, even if provider costs or the underlying model change sooner; invoices use the saved rate for the month of usage. Ordinary input, cached input, cache writes, and output are billed separately; reasoning is already included in output. Automatic managed conversation compaction is covered by Tailglow.

Billing Settings

To access billing:

  1. Click your team name in the top toolbar.
  2. Click the settings icon in the top-right corner.
  3. Navigate to the Billing tab.

From here you can manage:

  • Billing Email: Set a billing-specific email address for invoices and payment notifications.
  • Billing Plan: View your current billing plan.
  • Billing Address: Set your team’s billing address for invoices.

Estimated Invoice

A card named for the current period lists each billable line with the usage behind it, and an Estimated Total row that sums them and shows the date the period is invoiced.

Each amount reads as $2.60 (Est $43.35). The first figure is what the line has accrued so far. The figure in brackets is what it becomes by the time the invoice is issued, assuming the month carries on as it has been:

  • Storage keeps the data you are holding now and keeps growing at the rate measured over the last two weeks. A line with no recent growth is carried forward flat, and deleting data never projects the bill downward.
  • Compute keeps the servers that are running today running for the rest of the period. Scaling up or down moves this figure immediately.
  • AI tokens continue at the rate used so far this period. In the first day of a period there is not enough usage to project from, so the line reports what it has.
  • Subscription shows a single figure. It is committed for the whole period, so there is nothing to project.

Three things to know when reading it:

  • The bracketed figure is a forecast, not a measurement. It assumes today’s usage continues, so it moves whenever your storage or servers change. The figure on the left is the only one that is a fact.
  • Usage is measured from the hours it was actually held, which is why storage is billed in GB-months rather than the gigabytes you are storing right now. Two days of storage in a thirty day month bills for two days.
  • Both figures are shown before tax. Any applicable tax is calculated when the invoice is issued, so a team in a taxable jurisdiction pays more than the estimate shows.

Billing through the API

GET /v1/teams/:team_id/billing returns the current billing period, accrued and projected charges, server usage, the server-hour and AI credit balances, and your included storage. Every response has the same fields. It requires billing:read and credentials scoped to that team.

The response has object: "billing". Its totals show accrued charges. projected_line_items, projected_subtotal_cents, projected_discount_cents, and projected_total_cents estimate this period’s invoice.

The promo_* fields report the stored balances after the last invoice. The available_promo_* fields subtract accrued, uninvoiced usage. Use the available balances when showing how much credit is left to use. included_storage_gb_months is your plan’s monthly storage allowance and available_included_storage_gb_months is what this month has not used yet. calculated_at identifies the snapshot time; uninvoiced_server_hours can include the preceding month until its invoice is saved. Reading the summary never creates an invoice or deducts credits.

Payment Methods

You can add and manage payment methods from the billing settings.

Adding a Payment Method

  1. Click the plus button in the Payment Methods card.
  2. In Add New Payment Method, enter the cardholder name, card details, and billing address.
  3. Click Add Payment Method.

The first payment method added becomes the default. You can change the default at any time.

Managing Payment Methods

  • Set as default: Open the payment method’s actions menu and select Set As Default.
  • Delete: Open the actions menu and select Delete Payment Method. You cannot delete the last payment method on a team, regardless of its plan.

Invoices

The Invoices card shows each invoice’s number, period end date, total, and status. Use the link button to open an available hosted invoice in a new tab.

Credit Notes

Credits are granted by Tailglow staff and applied automatically when an invoice is paid, so no action is needed to redeem one. They are not deducted from the estimate, which reports usage rather than what is left to pay. Contact support to check a balance.

Discounts

Active discounts are applied automatically when each invoice is calculated.

Billing Activity

The Billing activity card lists what changed your team’s billing over the last 90 days: invoices being issued, paid, failing or voided, payment methods being added, changed or removed, plan changes, the free trial starting, being extended, pausing and ending, Tailglow AI resets and refills, discounts, and ingestion being paused or resumed for an unpaid invoice. Each entry shows who made the change. Tailglow marks changes made automatically, such as a payment arriving from your card, and Tailglow Admin marks changes made by Tailglow staff. It appears once there is activity to show.

Anyone with billing read access can see this list, and it is available through GET /v1/logs?type=billing. Your invoices and receipts remain the permanent record of what you paid.

Account Status and Billing

Your team’s billing status directly affects your account:

  • Active: Everything is working normally.
  • Delinquent: Tailglow emails your billing contact after a failed payment. A non-Enterprise team can become delinquent if an invoice becomes uncollectible or remains unpaid into a later billing cycle. Ingestion is paused until every unpaid invoice is paid or voided, and then resumes automatically.
  • Restricted: Project and team resources are read-only, and ingestion is paused. Billing and payment-method updates remain available so an Owner can resolve the issue, but payment methods cannot be deleted while the team is restricted.

See the Teams guide for more details on team statuses.