Billing & account

How billing works

Vocarium bills for what you use, on your card via Stripe:

• Telephony — per-minute rates for calls, which vary by destination, plus monthly phone-number rental.
• AI processing — speech recognition, language-model usage, and voice synthesis, metered per call.

The Usage page breaks consumption down by day and by component; each call in call history shows its own cost. The Billing page manages your payment method and shows invoices. There are no seats or per-agent fees — create as many agents as you like; you pay only when they talk.

Subscription plans

A plan is a monthly amount of the things you use most, at a set monthly price. Every account is on one — new accounts start on the free plan — and you can move to a different plan whenever you like from the Billing page. If you cancel, you keep what you paid for until the end of the month you paid for, and then go back to the free plan.

An allowance is a monthly amount, not a wall. Once you have used what your plan includes, your calls carry on exactly as before — the rest of the month is simply metered at the usual per-minute rates and comes off your balance. Nothing stops mid-conversation, and nothing needs your attention to keep working.

A few things are limits rather than allowances, and those do wait for a larger plan: how many phone numbers you can hold at once, and which apps you can connect. If you reach one of those, the dashboard says so and tells you what to do about it.

Here is what each plan includes today:

Plan charges and usage charges are separate lines on the same bill. Your monthly plan price is billed on its own date; everything you spend beyond the plan is metered as it happens and shown on the Usage page as it always has been.

Cancelling a plan

Cancelling never cuts you off mid-period. Your plan carries on to the end of the period you have already paid for — the month or the year that is running — and only then does the account go back to the free plan. We email you as soon as you cancel, so the end date is in writing, and again on the day it arrives. There is no refund of the part of the period you don't use, which is why cancelling late in a month costs you nothing extra.

The part worth planning for is your phone numbers. Numbers included in a plan were being paid for by the plan, so when it ends nothing is paying for them any more. If your prepaid balance covers their monthly rent, they quietly switch to being billed from the balance and keep answering as though nothing happened. If it doesn't, they are released back to the carrier — and a released number is not recoverable. If a number is on your van or your website, top the balance up before your plan ends.

If a payment fails

Cards expire and banks decline, so a failed charge is treated as something to fix rather than something to punish. The subscription — a plan, or a number you took on its own — is marked past due, and we try the charge again once a day for up to three days. Everything keeps working the whole time: agents answer, campaigns run, numbers stay yours.

After each failed attempt we email you. Every one of those emails carries the same two things: the exact date your numbers would be released, and a link that settles the bill in a couple of taps. Paying at any point in those three days ends the matter — nothing is lost and nothing needs re-ordering.

If the three days pass with the payment still unsettled:

• A plan drops the account back to the free plan. Numbers the plan included switch to being billed from your balance if the balance covers their rent, and are released if it doesn't.
• A number you took on its own does the same on its own account — billed from the balance if the balance can carry it, released if not.

Either way a final email tells you exactly what happened and which numbers, if any, went. A released number is not recoverable. It goes back to the carrier and may be given to someone else, so the three days are the window that matters.

Numbers billed from your balance are never released for non-payment — there is no card to decline. If the balance runs out, it simply goes negative and calling pauses until you top up. The numbers stay yours the whole time, and they only ever leave when you release them yourself.