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What are credits and what are they used for?

Credits are the "currency" that gets consumed by pings and alerts. Every time a ping is received or an alert is dispatched, credits are consumed.

Each of the payment plans have a certain number of credits that are included in the monthly recurring price of the plan. Even the Free Plan has a certain number of included credits.

These included credits are consumed during a billing period, and they reset to the full included number at the beginning of each billing period. For the Free Plan, the reset just happens one month after the previous reset.

Navigate to My Account, Billing & Invoices in the menu to see the start and end dates of the current reset period (even for the Free Plan).

On one of the paid plans, if your account consumes more than the included number of credits during a billing period, then those excess credits are billed at the "per extra credit" rate of your payment plan. Excess credits are billed at the end of the billing period.

On the Free Plan, if your account consumes more than the included credits, then all the resources in your account go dormant until the next credits reset. You cannot buy any excess credits for the Free Plan.

How do I limit the number of excess credits that can be consumed?

To configure what we call a "credits trip-switch" on your account, navigate to My Account, Credits Trip-Switch in the menu.

The number you enter there is the percentage of the included credits that you are willing to allow for excess credits. For example, if you enter a value of 100 and the included credits of your payment plan are 50,000, then the excess credits will be limited to 50,000. If you enter a value of 200, then the excess credits will be limited to 100,000.

If, during a billing period, your account runs into this limit, we will send you an email and all ping, monitor and alert functions will go dormant. Pings will be rejected, monitors will not monitor, and alert services will not dispatch alerts.

If you want to resume normal account functioning during the dormant period, then change the credits trip-switch percentage number to a higher value. The dormant functions will become active and resume consuming credits.

How are credits consumed?

In principle, credits are consumed when, on your behalf, our service communicates with an external resource or an external resource communicates with our service.

Credits are consumed by the following actions:

• One (1) credit is consumed by every ping action received by a Monitor via the Ping API endpoint.
• Ten (10) credits are consumed by every email alert send action by the built-in email alerting service.
• One (1) credit is consumed by every alert send action by any of the bespoke alerting services. If the same alert is sent to more than one destination or via more than one service, then each send action consumes a separate credit.
• One (1) credit is consumed by every external web page check that is performed by a Web Content type monitor.
• One (1) credit is consumed by every external web page check that is performed by a Web Response type monitor.

You can configure a trip-switch on your account. If the credits consumed exceed the included number by a certain percentage, we will alert you and temporarily pause all credit consumption actions on your account. The trip-switch protects you from runaway expenses.

Where do I see the details of the credits consumption?

Navigate to History, Credits Consumption in the menu for a blow-by-blow history of all the credits that were consumed in your account.