Billing & subscription terms

Billing runs on the 1st of each calendar month. Your subscription is charged in advance — on 1 March you pay for March.

Message charges work the other way round: they can only be totalled once a month has finished, so the messages you send and receive during March are charged on 1 April, alongside April's subscription. Your first invoice of any month therefore covers the month ahead plus the messages from the month just gone. Each line on the invoice says which period it belongs to.

You are never charged a full month you didn't have. If you start on the 23rd of a 30-day month, you pay for 8 days — the 23rd through the 30th — which at $1.99/month works out to about $0.53. From the 1st of the following month you pay the normal full price.

While your account is on trial you are not charged at all — no invoice, not even a zero one. Billing begins only when your account becomes active, and that first month is prorated from the day it starts.

Every message processed costs $0.000600, counted the same whether it is inbound (arriving for filtering) or outbound (sent through the relay). Usage is tracked live — you can see the running total any time under Billing → Usage in your portal, well before it is invoiced.

For scale: 10,000 messages in a month is $6.00.

Payments are handled by PayPal. The monthly subscription runs as a PayPal subscription, so it renews automatically until you cancel it. Message charges are settled from your account balance, which you top up through PayPal from the portal.

We never see or store your card details, and a payment is only ever recorded once PayPal itself confirms it.

Nothing happens suddenly, and you don't lose mail. The sequence is:

1. Past due — an invoice is unpaid. Mail keeps flowing exactly as normal.
2. Grace period (7 days) — still fully working. This is your window to settle up.
3. Suspended — mail stops being delivered, but it is not rejected or deleted. It is held safely in our queue. Pay the outstanding invoice and everything held is released and delivered.
4. After 7 days suspended — held mail is returned to its senders as undeliverable, so they know to reach you another way. Anything held is recoverable right up until that point.

In other words: you have 7 days of grace before suspension, and 7 more days after it during which nothing is lost.

You can cancel your subscription at any time from Billing → Subscription in the portal.

If we change the price, we will tell you by email in advance. An existing PayPal subscription keeps the price you originally agreed to — PayPal does not allow us to change an agreed recurring charge on your behalf, and we would not want to.

Your portal shows your balance, current usage, estimated next invoice, every invoice with its line items, and every payment and balance movement. Nothing described here is hidden from you.