Payment, Limits, and Top-Ups

Three controls on Settings → Billing belong to you: the payment method on file, a monthly spending limit, and automatic top-up. Everything else about the account — the billing model, the debt limit, and suspension — is set by Suger under an approval trail.

Add a payment method

You do not need one to use Insulin. The $100 monthly free credit is spendable without a card, and most accounts never add one. Add one when you want automatic top-up, or when you are moving to monthly billing.

1. Open Settings → Billing.
2. Under Payment method, select Add payment method (or Add another if one is already saved).
3. You are taken to Stripe’s hosted checkout page to enter the details, then returned to the same billing page.

Cards and US bank accounts are both accepted. Saved methods are listed by brand and last four digits — Visa ending 4242, Bank account ending 6789.

If the payment provider is briefly unavailable the panel says so and states plainly that your credit balance and AI usage are unaffected — it is a problem on Suger’s side, not something to fix in your own settings.

Set a monthly spending limit

A ceiling on what the organization may spend in a calendar month, whichever billing model it is on.

1. Under Monthly spending limit, enter an amount in US dollars.
2. Select Save limit.

To remove it, select Remove, or clear the field and save. An empty field means no limit.

Reaching your limit is not the same as running out of credit, and the fix is different: your balance is untouched, so adding credit will not resume service. Raise or remove the limit instead. See When AI pauses.

A limit set below what you have already spent this month applies straight away, though it can take up to a minute for in-flight requests to start being refused.

Turn on automatic top-up

Automatic top-up charges your saved payment method once the balance is at or below a trigger you choose, so a long-running job is not interrupted by a balance nobody was watching.

1. Save a payment method first — the switch is disabled without one, because there would be nothing to charge.
2. Turn on Automatic top-up.
3. Set When the balance is below (the trigger) and Top up by (the amount).
4. Select Save top-up settings.

Why the top-up must exceed the trigger. A top-up that lands back on its own trigger fires again immediately, and again after that. It is the only setting on this page that can charge real money repeatedly rather than once, so the console refuses to save it.

Credit added this way is Purchased credit and stays valid for three years — it is not lost at the end of the month.

How the limit and the top-up interact

Your monthly spending limit wins. Once the month’s spend reaches it, no top-up is charged for the rest of the month, whatever the balance does — charging you for credit you asked not to spend would defeat the point of setting a limit. The panel states this above the Save button whenever a limit is set.

This is the order the two controls are evaluated in, and it answers the two questions people arrive with: why didn’t my top-up fire? and why didn’t adding credit bring the service back?

So a paused service resumes only once the blocking condition itself is cleared: raise or remove the monthly spending limit if that is what stopped it, and add credit if the balance is what stopped it. Adding credit while the limit is reached changes nothing until the next month or until you raise the limit. When AI pauses walks the full set of pause conditions.

What you cannot change here

These sit behind an approval trail on Suger’s side, recorded with who changed them, when, and why. Contact support@suger.io to request a change.

The Suger-hosted tier step-down

The last row is worth stating plainly, because nothing on screen announces it.

The Suger-hosted model pool has two tiers: a Tier 1 quality model and several lighter Tier 2 models. Once your organization’s spend on Suger’s own key passes about $300 in a billing period, Tier 1 stops being offered for the rest of that period and the pool serves Tier 2.

It is not one of the reasons AI pauses. Those are refusals, and each raises a banner telling you which one applied. This is not a refusal: no banner appears, no request fails, and no conversation stops — the pool simply has fewer models in it, and answers may read as less capable.

Your own models are unaffected. A connected provider’s models are always preferred over the hosted pool, so an organization running on its own keys never meets this at all. If you want Tier 1 quality past that point, connect your own provider — see how a turn resolves to a model.

If a payment fails

Stripe retries a failed payment on its own schedule, up to four attempts, before the cycle is treated as exhausted. Nothing happens to your account during the retries — the most common cause is a temporary hold or a card that gets replaced within a few days.

Once the retries are exhausted:

Stored files and running sandboxes are unaffected either way.