Billing

Every plan includes a monthly allotment for receiving email, and stops receiving at 100% of it. On a paid plan you can turn on pay-as-you-go to keep receiving past the allotment, billed in blocks of 1,000 units.

Plans#

Two things don't vary by plan and so aren't columns above: 15-day retention and $0.60 per 1,000 of pay-as-you-go overage, both the same on every plan including Free. Free gets the same retention but stops receiving instead of billing for overage.

How usage is counted#

Usage is counted in 256 KB units. Almost every message is a single unit (a typical message without attachments is well under 50 KB), but a larger message costs more to receive, so it counts for more:

This is why the Received meter on your billing page is a unit count rather than a message count: if you receive large attachments, that number will be higher than the number of emails in your inbox, and that difference is real.

Your usage resets on the day of the month you subscribed, not on the 1st. If you subscribe on 12 July, your cycles run from 12 July to 12 August, then to 12 September, matching your Stripe invoices. Current usage is shown on the Billing and Settings pages.

Mail that Shield blocks is never delivered, but still counts as received, because it had already arrived before any rule could check it.

What Free includes#

The Free plan is a full working inbox: 200 received emails a month on one domain, with the same 15-day retention as the paid plans. It's the only plan with a daily limit, 50 received emails per UTC day, so a month's allotment can't be used up in an hour. Above that, mail is refused until midnight UTC.

• Registering a second domain returns 402.
• Attachment content isn't stored. The metadata (filename, type and size, with stored: false) still arrives, so you can see an attachment existed, but downloading it returns 402.

Message size#

Attachment content is stored up to your plan's message size: 10 MB on Basic, 25 MB on Pro and 50 MB on Scale. Larger messages still arrive and are stored; only their attachment content is skipped, and the metadata arrives with stored: false.

Retention#

Stored email is deleted 15 days after it arrives, along with its raw message and attachments. A daily job does the deleting, so a message may survive a few hours past the line, never less than the window. Retrieve anything you need to keep via the API or route it to a webhook, which is not subject to retention.

The retention period is the same on every plan, so upgrading or downgrading never changes how long your mail is kept.

Approaching your allotment#

We email you at 80% and 90% of your allotment, and again at 100%. Each notice is sent once per billing period, so a busy month doesn't turn into a stream of mail.

Reaching 100%#

By default every plan stops at its allotment: inbound mail is refused until the next period, an upgrade, or pay-as-you-go. Refused mail is not stored and cannot be recovered afterwards.

Pay-as-you-go#

Paid plans can keep going past their allotment by enabling pay-as-you-go on the Settings page. It is off until you turn it on: nothing bills above your plan price unless you asked for it.

With it on, overage is charged in blocks of 1,000 units at $0.60 per block on every paid plan. A block is charged when you enter it, so one unit past your allotment costs a full block.

The rate doesn't fall as you move up the plans, because prepaying is what gets you the cheaper rate: overage always costs more per email than the allotment it overflows, on every tier. It is there to keep mail moving, not to be a plan.

Turning it off takes effect immediately. If you are already past your allotment when you do, billing starts blocking straight away.

Free cannot enable pay-as-you-go: it blocks at its allotment, and at its daily ceiling before that.

Managing your subscription#

Upgrade, downgrade, and manage payment from the Billing page. Changes take effect immediately; your included allotment follows the active plan. Retention and the overage rate are the same everywhere, so neither changes when you switch.