Spend and budgets

The Spend page of your organization splits the month's usage charges by who caused them: projects, environments, API keys, and the members whose personal API keys sent it. Owners and admins see everything; members see their own spend.

Organization keys and personal keys

Every API key is one of two kinds:

• An organization key, for production servers, staging and shared jobs. Its usage is the organization's.
• A personal key, assigned to one member: its usage is that member's spend. Members create them for themselves in environments that allow it, to experiment without touching the organization's keys; coss login and coss init create them too. Owners and admins can assign a key to any member. See personal keys for who can create them and what they can do.

Spend follows the key that sent each email (a broadcast's emails follow the key that created it). Emails sent from the dashboard are the organization's. A member's spend stays theirs after the key is revoked.

How spend is counted

Spend is a share of the month's usage charges, at your plan's prices: each product's charge is split by each source's share of its usage (email recipients, for example). Because prices get cheaper with volume and your plan includes credit or units, what a member costs depends on the whole organization's usage, and the parts always add up to the usage lines of your invoice.

• Your plan's credit pays for spend, it doesn't reduce it: a member's experiments show their real share even when the credit covers them.
• Discounts on a product reduce its spend; on Free, usage within the allowance costs $0.
• Sandbox usage is never billed, so it is never spend.
• Usage recorded before coss.com kept its source belongs to its environment, without a key or a member.

The same split is available from the API: GET /v1/billing/usage with group_by project, api_key or user (Plans and billing).

Budgets

Owners set monthly budgets on the Spend page's Budgets tab:

coss.com checks spend every few minutes. At each alert threshold of a budget (80% and 100% unless you change them) it emails the billing contacts, and the member it concerns, and sends a billing.budget_threshold_reached event. Once spend goes over a budget:

• Live sends from that source are refused with 402 billing_error (budget_exceeded) — over SMTP, 550. Scheduled emails wait instead, and broadcasts pause (pause_reason budget_exceeded) and resume by themselves.
• Everything else keeps working: other members' and the organization's keys, sandbox keys, and reads.
• billing.budget_hold_placed is sent, and billing.budget_hold_lifted when it ends: at the start of the next month, or as soon as an owner raises (or removes) the budget.

Checks run every few minutes, so spend can pass a budget by what is sent in between. Emails already accepted before the pause still go out. A budget of $0 allows no billable usage at all.

Budgets sit alongside your organization's spend limit (in billing settings), which pauses all live sending once usage beyond your credit reaches it.