Billing Standing
Billing standing is your organization’s payment health, expressed as one of four states. It is derived, never assigned: the platform computes it from stored billing facts — whether a payment method is on file, whether an invoice has gone unpaid, how many billing cycles in a row have failed — and recomputes it whenever one of those facts changes.
Standing matters because two of the four states replace your plan’s limits with the free tier. See it on the Billing page in the dashboard.
Standing is one of several billing signals, and they answer different questions. Standing asks can this organization be charged at all — see Payment Failures for what happens once a statement we issued goes unpaid, Outstanding Balance for usage not yet invoiced, and Budgets for telling yourself about your own spend.
The four standings
| Standing | What it means | Which limits apply |
|---|---|---|
active | A payment method is on file and nothing is outstanding. | Your plan’s |
free | No payment method on file. | Free tier |
grace | Something is wrong with billing, but you have time to fix it. | Your plan’s, until the deadline |
delinquent | Billing failed and the grace window is over. | Free tier |
Organizations created before the payment-method requirement shipped are exempt: their standing is always active, they are never limited by it, and they see none of this. Exemption is visible on the profile as payment_method_required = false.
The free tier
An organization on the free tier can still transcode, within these limits:
| Dimension | Free tier |
|---|---|
| Output duration | 30 seconds |
| Quality tiers | economy only |
| Jobs in flight | 1 (queued and running together) |
Jobs over these limits are rejected, never shortened. A job whose encode window exceeds 30 seconds is refused with output_duration_limit_exceeded; one asking for standard or premium is refused with quality_tier_not_allowed; and submitting a second job while one is still in flight is refused with queue_limit_exceeded. These are the same error codes the equivalent plan limits use — nothing new to handle.
The free tier replaces the whole limit ladder while it applies, including any per-app override. Adding a payment method restores your plan’s limits.
Free-tier usage is recorded but not invoiced. Delinquent usage is: an account in arrears still accrues charges and settles them on recovery.
Grace windows
A grace window keeps your current limits while you fix the problem. The deadline is on the profile as grace_until.
| Cause | standing_reason | Window |
|---|---|---|
| Card expired | card_expired | 14 days |
| Payment method removed | card_removed | 14 days |
| Invoice unpaid | invoice_past_due | 7 days |
| Second unpaid cycle in a row | repeated_invoice_failure | None |
When a grace window closes without the problem being fixed, the organization moves to delinquent (for an unpaid invoice) or to free (for a lapsed card).
The zero-grace rule is worth spelling out: the counter behind it resets only when an invoice pays without ever entering dunning. Paying an invoice after it has already gone past due ends that episode but does not earn the grace window back, so a second failure before a clean cycle is delinquent immediately.
Jobs already accepted are never affected
A downgrade applies to new job creation only. A job accepted while your organization was active runs to completion under the limits it was accepted with, even if standing degrades while it is queued or encoding. Nothing is killed, cancelled, or re-checked against the new limits mid-flight.
The same holds in the other direction for work already queued: it drains and bills normally.
How quickly a change is noticed
| Change | Noticed |
|---|---|
| Invoice paid or failed | Seconds — the payment provider notifies us |
| Payment method added or removed | On your next billing-page load, and within 6 hours otherwise |
| A grace deadline passing | Exactly at the deadline |
If you have just added a card and are still seeing free-tier limits, open the Billing page — loading it re-reads your payment methods from the provider and updates your standing immediately.
How and when you are charged
Standing decides which limits apply; it does not change how billing itself works. Usage is invoiced monthly in arrears on calendar months — charged on the 1st for the month that just closed — in EUR, by Polar, our merchant of record. Prices shown to consumers include applicable VAT; EU businesses that supply a valid VAT ID are charged net of VAT under the reverse-charge mechanism. The Pricing page has the detail.
What standing does not do
- Standing itself never suspends an organization. Degrading to
freeordelinquentchanges which limits a new job is allowed to ask for, and nothing else. A statement that stays unpaid does eventually lead to suspension, but that is the payment-failure schedule acting on an unpaid invoice — a separate mechanism with its own published deadlines — not standing. - It never deletes anything, and never touches stored outputs or hosted video.
- It never changes prices. What you are charged for a job does not depend on standing.
- It never affects playback: standing has no effect on delivery at all.