Billing in your account

This page is about managing billing in the dashboard. For what the plans cost and what each one includes, see Pricing — the prices live in one place so they cannot drift.

The only thing you actively manage is your Ink balance: AI and agent work spends Ink, while channels, brands, and scheduled posts are unlimited on paid plans.

One subscription covers all your brands (organizations) — a second brand attaches to your existing subscription, never a new charge. Billing belongs to the account (the payer), and every member of a covered organization shares its features. Your account’s main organization can’t be deleted while a subscription is active.

Seats

Pro is a single seat. Team is billed per seat — one seat per teammate, across all your brands, with annual subscriptions billing ten months per year to match the plan discount (seat price). Pro can’t add seats — Team is the way to bring in teammates.

Agents don’t occupy seats. AI work is metered in Ink, so a solo operator running many agents stays a one-seat Pro.

Ink — your account balance

AI and agent work spends Ink from one prepaid balance shared across all your brands. Each billing cycle grants the plan’s Ink, and every AI action or skill run deducts from the balance at a published, flat rate — see the rate card.

• Top-ups. Buy a pack whenever you run low. Top-ups add to the same balance and never expire.
• Plan Ink resets each cycle. The monthly grant is for that cycle — whatever’s unused expires at renewal, and a fresh grant lands with the new cycle. (Trial Ink likewise expires when the trial ends.)
• Prepaid, never a surprise bill. Ink is bought before it’s spent — there is no metered overage billing, so the most an agent can ever consume is the balance you’ve already paid for.
• Overage is forgiven. If a running action tips the balance slightly below zero, the difference is never billed — Inklate simply refuses to start new AI work while the balance is empty.
• A low-balance heads-up, once per cycle. When the balance falls to about 20% of the cycle’s grant, the organization’s admins get one notification (email/Slack). Inklate never buys Ink on your behalf — topping up stays your decision.

The Usage tab in Settings → Billing shows the live balance and a full ledger of grants, debits, and top-ups.

The onboarding gate: trial or pay now

There is no free tier at signup. When you create your first organization, onboarding ends at a plan step with two ways in:

• Start the 14-day free trial. A card is required, but nothing is charged today. The first charge lands when the trial ends on day 14, and you can cancel any time before then and pay nothing. Trials come with the plan’s full Ink grant, so you can try skills and agents before paying (trial Ink expires when the trial ends).
• Skip the trial and pay now. You are charged immediately for the plan and cadence you picked.

This gate applies only to your first organization. Only organization owners and admins can act on billing, so a regular member of a lapsed organization is never locked out at a paywall — they keep working and hit in-context limits instead.

Brands: one subscription, several organizations

One subscription covers unlimited organizations on both plans. The organization you checked out from is covered automatically; an owner or admin can attach any additional organization to the same subscription — never a second checkout, never a second charge. Covered organizations share the payer’s Ink balance and each get the plan’s features.

Free organizations

An organization that isn’t attached to a subscription runs free until it needs a paid feature:

• Post quota — a free organization can hold up to 5 posts, lifetime. Creating a sixth requires upgrading or attaching that organization.
• Teammates — free organizations work solo.
• Ink — free organizations have no Ink balance, so skills and AI actions are unavailable.
• Channels — capped at 3 connected channels.

When you hit one of these limits, the error tells you which one, and the upgrade dialog opens with the reason attached.

Managing your plan

Billing lives in Settings → Billing for the current organization. A header strip answers the essentials at a glance — plan, seats, credits, next invoice — above three tabs:

• Usage — the Ink wallet (balance, ledger, top-up) and this-cycle meters: Ink used against the monthly grant, seats, and — on free organizations — the channel cap.
• Plans — the plan cards. All changes happen in-app on your existing subscription — never a second checkout — and follow one rule: Ink follows money.
  • Upgrades apply immediately. You pay the prorated difference for the rest of the cycle, and the dialog shows exactly how much Ink lands in your balance today (the difference up to the bigger plan’s grant).
  • Downgrades wait for renewal. Moving to a smaller plan (or from annual to monthly, or removing seats) is scheduled for your next billing date: you keep the plan you paid for — and its Ink — until then, there’s no refund, and nothing to pay today. A banner shows the pending change with an undo, any time before the date.
  • Switching back and forth never mints extra Ink — within a cycle you’re only ever granted up to the biggest plan you actually paid for, once.
• Billing — cancel or resume the plan (cancellation takes effect at the end of the current period), and open the hosted customer portal to update your payment method or download invoices.

A free organization sees the plan picker inline on the same page. You can also upgrade from the upgrade dialog that opens when you hit a free-plan limit.

Plan statuses

Your subscription status comes from the payment provider verbatim: pending, active, on_hold, cancelled, failed, or expired. There is no separate “trialing” status — a trial is an active subscription inside its 14-day trial window, and Settings → Billing shows a Trial badge with the date of the first charge until the window ends.

Payments are handled by DodoPayments

Checkout, cards, invoices, and tax are processed by DodoPayments, the merchant of record — it handles tax/VAT in 220+ countries. Inklate never sees or stores your card details; it keeps only a local record of your subscription and wallet, updated by DodoPayments webhooks. Payment-method changes and invoices go through the hosted DodoPayments customer portal; everything else — plan changes, seats, add-ons, cancellation — happens in-app.