Budgets & billing
Waveguide bills a flat monthly base per plan plus metered overage on AI model usage. This page explains exactly how the meter works and what happens at each threshold — the goal is that you can never be surprised by a bill.
What’s metered
Only AI and platform-managed AI vendors your agent consumes: Claude tokens (including prompt-cache writes/reads), Firecrawl research credits, Wavemaker creative (image/video), meet-bot voice (STT/TTS/LLM), and side-path Haiku (quarantine, reply classify, voice distill). Metering is priced to the cent from published vendor rates and recorded in a ledger on Dashboard → Billing. Usage beyond your included budget bills as our cost × 1.3 on top of the monthly plan fee. Social posting (Ayrshare) is covered by the monthly fee (profile-based, not per post). Your ad spend is not our billing — money you spend on Meta goes to Meta and is governed by your daily spend cap, not your plan.
Two independent meters record every call (one in the runtime, one in the egress proxy) and are reconciled daily — a disagreement is an incident on our side, never a mystery charge on yours.
Included budgets
| Plan | Base | Included model budget |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 one-time credits (lifetime, no monthly refill) |
| Starter | $199/mo | $15/mo |
| Growth | $499/mo | $50/mo |
| Scale | $1,499/mo | $200/mo |
Paid included budgets reset each calendar month. Free credits are one-time: when they run out, the agent pauses until you upgrade. Most single-business tenants on Starter stay inside the monthly budget; the agent also economizes automatically, running scheduled work on a fast, cheap model and saving the strong model for hard problems.
The 80 / 100 / 120 guardrails
Paid plans:
- 80% — heads-up. You get an email. Nothing changes.
- 100% — economy mode. The agent switches to the lighter model for non-urgent work. Usage beyond the included budget bills as overage at our cost × 1.3, metered daily.
- 120% — hard stop. The agent pauses itself. Usage resets next month, or upgrade for more included budget.
Free: hard stop at 100% of promotional credits (no soft-land runway, no overage). Upgrade from Billing to continue.
Free credits and paid trials
New accounts start free with $5 AI credits and no card. Paid plans (Starter / Growth / Scale) can be started from Pricing with a 14-day free trial — card collected at checkout, nothing charged until day 15. We email you 3 days before a paid trial ends. Cancel from Billing during the trial and you pay nothing.
Managing your subscription
Dashboard → Billing shows your plan, credits or monthly budget meter, and (on paid plans) overage estimate. Free accounts upgrade from that page. Paid accounts use Manage subscription for the Stripe customer portal where you can:
- switch plans (upgrades apply immediately, including the bigger included budget; downgrades at next cycle),
- update your payment method,
- download invoices,
- cancel (takes effect at period end).
Failed payments
If a charge fails, we email you and your agent keeps running for a 7-day grace period while Stripe retries and you update the card. If payment still fails after the grace period, the agent pauses until billing is fixed — your data is untouched.
Leaving
Cancel any time. After cancellation the agent stops, and your data remains available for export for 30 days. You can also delete everything immediately from Settings — workspace, vault, history, machine — permanently.