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Billing overview

Sencai bills on two axes that add up on the same invoice rather than competing with each other: your organization’s plan (what the company runs - its managed resources, how much of running them is automated, and the people who need access) and each member’s personal plan / seat (their own AI allowance). No personal plan limits how many organizations you may own or how many members an organization can have - see Seats & personal plans for what it actually governs. This page explains how the two fit together; the rest of this section covers each in detail.

The two billing axes, with an example

Section titled “The two billing axes, with an example”

Say you’re a Member of “Acme Cloud” (a paid organization), and you also personally own a smaller free organization of your own.

  • Acme Cloud’s plan governs what Acme Cloud pays, not what it can do: how many managed resources it runs, how much of operating them it hands to automation, and how many people need access beyond the allowance that automation includes. It does not decide which features Acme Cloud gets - every paid organization runs the whole platform. Acme Cloud pays for this, and any Owner or Admin there can change it - and because Acme Cloud is paid, it also pays for your seat there (at least Plus), as its own invoice line. Being introduced: outside Sencai’s own development environment that seat line isn’t invoiced yet, and your AI allowance still comes from your own personal plan rather than from the seat.
  • Your personal plan on your own, separate free organization is entirely independent of the seat Acme Cloud pays for - one account can hold a paid seat in one organization and a free personal plan governing another organization it owns, at the same time.

Being an Admin at Acme Cloud has no effect on your own organization, and nothing about your own organization affects what Acme Cloud’s other members can do. The only place the two ever interact directly is when someone sponsors a plan beyond the seat floor a paid organization already covers - see Seats & personal plans - which can be another person or the organization itself, on top of what it already pays for the seat.

The 14-day trial

Section titled “The 14-day trial”

Two independent 14-day trials run today, one per organization and one per person - not the single either/or the heading might suggest.

Every new organization created the ordinary way - not just your first one, and regardless of how many you’ve already made - starts its own 14-day clock the instant it’s created. You’ll get a reminder around day 11; if nobody has put the organization on a paid plan by day 14, the organization is locked to the read-only state described below. See Organization plans for what the free configuration includes in the meantime. Two narrower creation paths skip this clock entirely and land straight on the free configuration with no trial at all: an MSP onboarding a new managed customer, and splitting part of an existing organization off into a new one.

Separately, every new person - anyone who gets an account, including one provisioned for them through SCIM - starts their own 14-day personal trial the moment that account is created, on a trial personal-plan tier that isn’t tied to any one organization. You’ll get a reminder around day 11; on day 14 it converts automatically to the Free personal plan - you’re never suspended. That conversion can also put an organization you own into a grace period, but only if you personally own more organizations than a Free personal plan lets you own for free - not if any one of them has grown past Free’s own resource or member limits, which is a separate, organization-level thing (see Organization plans). In practice this doesn’t come up today: no personal plan, Free included, currently caps how many organizations you may own - see Seats & personal plans. If an organization ever does land in a grace period this way, it gets 14 days before being suspended to read-only, never archived or deleted, the same as the non-payment grace period covered in Payment, invoices and failed payments. This personal trial runs today, in every environment, for every new account.

A different, org-anchored per-person trial is the decided direction, but it isn’t live in any environment yet. It would replace the account-wide personal trial above, not add to it: instead of a trial tier independent of any organization, the first organization you create or join after registering would give you a free Plus-tier seat for 14 days in that specific organization, at no cost to it, granted once per person - joining or creating a further organization afterward wouldn’t grant it again. When it ends, your seat would either drop to Free (if that organization is still on the free configuration) or continue as a paid Plus seat billed to the organization (if it’s on a paid plan) - see Seats & personal plans for the full design. Until it ships, every new account keeps getting the account-wide personal trial described above instead.

Nothing is ever deleted because a trial or a free configuration’s limits are reached. Reaching the free configuration’s own limits (a sixth managed resource, or a second member beyond the single free user) is blocked on any organization, trial or not - the resource limit’s error tells you to add billing to go further, but the member limit’s error today doesn’t prompt you to do anything, it just says the limit is reached; see Organization plans. The free configuration’s third limit, 30 hosted CI minutes a month, refuses nothing: new CI jobs wait instead - see CI minutes. The organization’s own trial expiring makes creating or changing cloud instances and editing the organization’s own settings read-only - it does not currently stop you from sending invitations. Every read-only screen and the billing/checkout screens themselves stay reachable the whole time either way.

Where billing lives in the app

Section titled “Where billing lives in the app”

Everything about billing for the active organization lives in one place: the Billing tab of the organization page, reached from Settings → Billing (/gravity/organisation/detail?tab=billing). It has three sections:

  • Plan & seats - your current mode (Free or Paid), your members and resources against the free limits, the projected total for the month, and the seat list. This is the only place a plan is changed: Upgrade to paid (with Preview price first) or Return to Free.
  • Costs & usage - what has accrued so far this period, the projection for the whole period, a breakdown by plan, and the metered activity of the calendar month.
  • Invoices & payment - invoices with PDF download, your payment method, billing e-mail, next billing date, and the link to the Stripe-hosted billing portal. See Payment, invoices and failed payments.

The older addresses /gravity/settings/subscription, /gravity/settings/billing and /gravity/settings/upgrade still work - they open this tab - so bookmarks and links in e-mails you already received keep landing in the right place. You’ll also arrive here automatically after checkout, or from an upgrade prompt when you hit a plan limit.

Your own personal plan is managed from your profile rather than from organization settings - see Personal plans.

Who can change billing

Section titled “Who can change billing”

Changing an organization’s plan (including returning it to Free), or managing payment methods requires the Owner or Admin role in that organization. On top of the role, an organization can also restrict a specific member’s access to billing down to read-only or none at all, independent of their role - see Roles & permissions for how that per-resource override works. Your own personal plan is scoped to you alone; no one else’s organization role affects it.

Payment receipts, trial warnings, and failed-payment notices go specifically to your organization’s billing owners - the Owners and Admins who still have billing access, once any read-only-or-none override above is taken into account - not automatically to everyone with those roles. Payment receipts and failed-charge notices from checkout reach every one of them; the trial reminder and the ongoing non-payment reminders currently reach only one. See Billing owners for that distinction and for how the group is kept from ever reaching zero people.

What’s next

Section titled “What’s next”