What to do when you reach your credit limit

This article explains what happens as you approach and reach your monthly credit limit, and what you can do to keep working. For a refresher on how credits are calculated, see Understanding Fliplet credits.

Contents

• Approaching the limit
• Reaching the limit (100%)
• When a single request is too big
• The grace buffer on paid plans
• What still works when you’re out of credits
• If you’re a standard user
• Your options for keeping work going

Approaching the limit

Fliplet alerts you at three points before you reach your limit: 70%, 80%, and 90% of your monthly allowance.

At each threshold, organization admins receive:

• An email with a summary of how much of the allowance has been used and what the current balance is.
• A notification in the Studio inbox with a View billing button that opens the billing page directly.
• A real-time toast notification inside Studio if they’re logged in at the moment the threshold is crossed.

Standard users in the same workspace also see a toast notification when the threshold is crossed, with a button that opens a dialog explaining what happened and listing the admins they can email to ask for more credits. They don’t receive emails. Only admins do.

The usage row above the chat input shows the percentage of credits used at all times (for example, 72% of credits used), so everyone in the workspace can see where they stand, regardless of role. At each threshold the row shifts to a warning state.

Each threshold notification fires once per cycle. You won’t get repeated 70% emails if your usage hovers around that level.

Reaching the limit (100%)

At 100%, admins receive a final notification and email. What happens next depends on your plan and the type of action being charged.

• On the Free plan, further actions that consume credits are blocked until you upgrade or the cycle resets. (Top-ups are only available on paid plans.) End-user activity stops at 100%.
• On any paid plan, you get a 10% grace buffer above 100% on end-user activity in published projects. If the buffer runs out, end-user activity stops and your project goes offline until you top up, upgrade, or the cycle resets. A single busy day doesn’t take live projects offline immediately. See The grace buffer on paid plans below.
• On Enterprise plans, your credit envelope is reconciled with your account manager. Sustained overage is handled through your contract rather than blocking your workspace.

When a single request is too big

Sometimes you’ll be blocked before you reach 100%. The most common cause is a single AI prompt that would cost more credits than you have left in your allowance.

When you send a prompt in the builder, Fliplet runs a quick check before forwarding it to the AI. If the estimated cost is higher than your remaining balance, the request is rejected upfront with the message: Not enough Fliplet credits to complete this request. Top up or upgrade to keep going. The chat shows a Resume chat button so you can pick up where you left off once an admin has topped up or upgraded the plan.

The first time this happens in a cycle, admins also receive a separate “insufficient credits” notification and email so they know an action was blocked even though the total used hasn’t reached 100% yet. This is most common on the Free plan, where the allowance is small relative to a single AI turn.

The grace buffer on paid plans

All paid plans get an additional 10% buffer above 100%. The buffer covers everything counted in the run column on the Billing breakdown:

• End-users opening your published projects.
• Data source queries (reads) and writes (create, update, or delete) made from inside a published project.
• AI requests made from inside an end-user-facing project (for example, an in-project assistant).
• Server-side activity tied to your published projects: scheduled automations, transactional emails, SMS, push notifications, maps lookups, file storage, and per-record data storage.

The buffer does not apply to actions you take inside the builder. AI generation, publishing, and sending an email from Studio all stop at 100% on every paid plan. The build column on the Billing breakdown is what cuts at 100%.

Once the grace buffer is used up, the activities that were relying on it also stop until you top up, upgrade, or the cycle resets. Topping up settles the buffer that was consumed before adding the rest to your top-up balance, so you start fresh.

The Free plan has no grace buffer. End-user activity stops at 100% on Free, the same as builder actions.

What still works when you’re out of credits

Running out of credits doesn’t lock you out of your workspace and it doesn’t delete anything. Even when you’ve consumed your full allowance and grace buffer, you can still:

• Sign in to Studio and access your organization settings.
• See the list of your existing projects.
• Open the Billing page, buy a top-up, change or cancel your plan.
• Archive projects you’re no longer using, or unpublish them from a channel. The standing charges (0.5 per project, plus 2 to 3 per published channel) are refunded against the current cycle.
• Delete files from your media library to free up storage. The bytes you free are refunded against the current cycle’s running file-storage total, so deleting unused files can recover credits during the cycle.

What stops is anything that would create a new charge: AI generation, publishing, new email or SMS sends, new automation runs, and any end-user activity in published projects once the grace buffer is exhausted. Projects that depend on live data, server-side automations, or notifications won’t function normally for your end-users in that state, and end-users will see a page saying the limits have been reached and that the administrators were notified.

Projects themselves are not deleted, archived, or unpublished. They resume normal operation as soon as you top up, upgrade, or the cycle resets.

If you’re a standard user

Only organization admins can change plans or buy top-ups. If you’re a standard user and you hit a blocked action (such as generating a project with AI), a dialog appears with:

• A short explanation of what happened.
• The date your organization’s credits will reset.
• Your own usage this cycle (so you can include it in a message to an admin).
• A list of admins in your organization, each with a one-click email link that opens a pre-filled message.

You’ll also see the percentage of credits used above the chat input so you can keep track of how much room is left.

Your options for keeping work going

Admins have several ways to keep work going when credits are running low:

1. Wait for the cycle reset. If your cycle is about to end (visible on the billing page), waiting may be the simplest option.
2. Archive unused projects. Each project in your workspace charges 0.5 credits per cycle, and each published project adds 2 to 3 credits per channel. Archiving a project (or unpublishing it from a channel) refunds those charges against the current cycle’s running total. Use the Breakdown by project view on the Billing page to find projects you’re no longer actively using.
3. Free up file storage. If your usage is dominated by file storage, deleting media files you no longer need refunds the freed space against the current cycle. Check the Breakdown by activity view on the Billing page to see how much of your usage is going to storage.
4. Buy a top-up. Available on all paid plans. Top-up credits don’t expire and are spent only after your monthly allowance. See Buy a top-up.
5. Upgrade your plan. A higher tier gives you more monthly credits and more team seats. Any unused portion of your current plan is prorated by Stripe. See Change your plan.
6. Contact us for Enterprise pricing. If your needs exceed the largest Max tier, an Enterprise plan gives you a custom credit envelope and dedicated support. Get in touch.

Tip: If you regularly use most of your monthly allowance, upgrading is usually cheaper per credit than buying repeated top-ups. Top-ups are best for one-off bursts. Plan upgrades are best for sustained higher usage.