Plans, seats & usage
What each plan includes, how seats are counted, and exactly what happens when an allowance runs out. The short version: submissions are never throttled, nothing is ever billed as overage, and you pay for your team rather than your audience.
Where it lives
Settings → Billing (billing:read to see it,
billing:write to change it) shows your plan, live usage meters and the tier grid.
Payment methods, invoices and receipts are handled by Stripe's own billing portal, reached
from the same page — card details never touch Faldaro.
What each allowance does at its limit
This is the part worth reading before you need it. Each limit behaves differently, on purpose:
| Allowance | At the limit |
|---|---|
| Submissions | Nothing happens — ever. Counted and shown, never refused. A public form that stopped accepting submissions would be an outage caused by our billing, inflicted on someone with no way to resolve it. |
| Storage | New uploads that no longer fit are refused. Everything already stored stays readable. A banner warns account holders as the cap nears. |
| Emails | Messages are held, never lost, and send when the month rolls over or the plan grows. Account email — invitations, password resets — is exempt and always sends. |
| AI credits | Refused at the limit — unless prepaid pack credits remain, which are drawn next. This stays the one hard stop: nothing is ever charged automatically, and a runaway loop should cost you nothing you did not prepay. |
| Seats | New people cannot be added until a seat frees or you buy more. Nobody is ever removed. |
There is no overage billing anywhere in Faldaro. Going over an allowance is never a charge — it is either counted, held, or refused. A prepaid credit pack does not change that: it is money you chose to spend up front, never a meter running behind your back. Allowances reset on the first of each calendar month.
Prepaid AI credit packs
Paid plans can buy extra AI credits as one-time packs from the billing page — $10 for 300 credits, $30 for 1,000. Three rules, all deliberate:
- Packs never expire and never renew. A pack is a single purchase; unused pack credits carry forward indefinitely.
- Packs are drawn only after the monthly allowance is used — the allowance always spends first, and the meter says which pool an action draws from.
- One balance per billed group. Like the allowances themselves, pack credits are shared across your organisation and the organisations beneath it.
A refund made from the Stripe dashboard does not remove credits already added — the balance never goes negative, and credits may already have been spent.
Seats
A seat is a distinct active person holding any role in your organisation or the organisations beneath it. Consequences:
- A second role costs nothing — the same person in two organisations of your tree is one seat.
- Invitations occupy a seat immediately, not when accepted.
- Deactivating frees a seat; reactivating needs one to be free.
- A lower seat count never evicts anybody — it stops new people joining until attrition catches up.
Starter and Team can buy extra seats at $7 each per month (ten months' price on annual billing, matching the two-months-free rule). They are capped where the next tier becomes the better deal, and the interface says so rather than selling you past it. Business does not sell extras — the next step there is a conversation.
Changing plan
- Upgrades apply immediately, with the difference prorated and invoiced at once.
- Downgrades are scheduled for the end of the period you have paid for. Nothing changes today, and you keep your current allowances right up to the switch.
- Monthly → annual is an upgrade (it applies now, with unused monthly time credited); annual → monthly takes effect when the year you paid for ends.
- Cancelling always runs to the end of the period — service continues until what you paid for runs out, and you can resume before then. Nothing is deleted on cancellation.
Extra seats and plan changes are deliberately kept apart: remove purchased extras before changing plan, since seats are priced per plan. Two billing changes interacting silently is how billing surprises are made.
Free, and the 3%
The Free plan is free forever, needs no card, and includes the same builder, logic engine and workflows as every paid plan — with unlimited forms and ten thousand submissions a month. Two things distinguish it: public forms carry a small "powered by Faldaro" line, and money collected through a form keeps 3% as a platform fee. Every paid plan is 0% and removes the attribution.
The fee is frozen onto each payment when it is taken, so upgrading later does not retroactively change what an old payment paid — and collecting nothing costs nothing, which is how Free pays for itself instead of charging you.
Organisations, plans and inheritance
A child organisation is covered by the nearest ancestor holding a subscription, and inherits any extra seats bought there. Storage, email and AI-credit allowances are measured across the whole billed group rather than per organisation — so creating child organisations divides an allowance, it never multiplies it. The meters show the same figure the limits actually use.
When a subscription lapses
Nothing anywhere refuses work because a payment failed. A past-due subscription keeps its entitlements, a banner tells the people who can act on it, and that is the whole enforcement story — turning a billing problem into a lockout is not something Faldaro does to your submitters.
Self-hosted deployments
Plan enforcement is a deployment switch that is off by default. A self-hosted Faldaro has no limits at all unless its operator turns enforcement on. Usage is recorded either way, so the numbers are there to look at before anyone decides to enforce them.