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.

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.

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.