When you are charged a credit, and when you get it back

1 credit = 1 signed envelope. Credits are prepaid, never expire, and there is no seat subscription. The number of recipients on an envelope does not change its cost; the number of pages does not either.

You are charged when the envelope is sent, not when it completes. Uploading, preparing, and placing fields are all free — an envelope you never send costs nothing. A multi-document envelope is still 1 credit no matter how many files it holds (see article 11).

Voiding returns the credit, provided that envelope's charge has not already been refunded. When it works, the confirmation reads "Envelope voided. 1 credit returned." If it does not, the envelope was already refunded or was never charged, and the confirmation just reads "Envelope voided."

Credits are not returned when an envelope is declined or expires. The work of sending was done in both cases.

If you run out, the send is refused outright — never queued. The API answers 402 with insufficient_credits and your current balance. Nothing was delivered and nothing was charged, so once you top up you can retry the exact same send safely. Your recipients see nothing; from their side the envelope was never sent.

Auto top-up

Auto top-up buys a fresh credit pack for you when a send drops your balance below a threshold you set. Two things about it are worth knowing before you rely on it:

• It does not rescue a send that is already failing. Top-up is triggered by a completed debit, then runs in the background. A send refused with 402 stays refused — top up and retry.
• It is capped. There is a daily limit on successful top-ups and a monthly spending limit, so a runaway integration cannot bill you without bound. When a cap is reached, top-up pauses and notifies you rather than continuing to charge.

Only one top-up attempt is ever outstanding for an account at a time, so a burst of sends cannot produce a burst of duplicate charges.