Account & Billing
Auto-recharge
When your balance dips below a threshold you set, we charge your saved card and top it back up, no one in the loop.
Auto-recharge is the difference between a prepaid balance and an outage risk: without it, traffic stops with a 402 the moment credits run out; with it, a dip below your threshold triggers an automatic, off-session charge to the card on file. Setup is three steps on the Billing page (billing admins only):
Save a card
Add a card opens a Stripe-hosted setup page, the card is saved with a mandate for merchant-initiated charges and, like all payments here, never touches Pearl's servers. The card on file (brand and last four digits) is always visible on the Billing page, and Replace card swaps it at any time.
Set your threshold and amount
- Recharge when balance is below, minimum $1. Set it high enough to cover the traffic you serve while a charge settles; for steady production loads, a day's spend is a sensible floor.
- Recharge amount, minimum $5, the same bounds as a manual top-up. Larger amounts mean fewer charges (and fewer card-decline opportunities).
Enable it
Flip the toggle and save. The switch only arms once a card is on file. The Billing page shows the last time an auto-recharge ran, and every automatic charge lands in payment history marked Auto, with the failure reason if a charge declines.
What to expect
- Detection is balance-driven, not schedule-driven: the charge fires when the balance crosses your threshold, so quiet weeks cost nothing.
- If a charge fails (expired card, insufficient funds), the balance keeps draining toward zero, watch payment history for Failed entries, fix the card, and top up manually if needed. Failures don't retry your traffic away; only an empty balance does.
- Auto-recharge applies to prepaid accounts only, invoiced (enterprise) accounts never need it.
Belt and suspenders for production: auto-recharge on, plus a 402 alert in your own monitoring (see error handling). The first tells you the system is working; the second tells you the moment it isn't.