Credits and overage
What credits meter, why staff cannot top them up, how to grant unlimited credits, and how overage settlement is set.
Credits and caps are two different things and staff confuse them constantly. This page separates them and gives you the three levers you actually have.
Before you start
- Read Licences first. Credits sit on a licence.
- Have the customer's workspace open, not only their email address.
Caps and credits are different axes
| Caps | Credits | |
|---|---|---|
| What they meter | Countable product objects: seats, campaigns, reports | Real money spent on outside data runs |
| Examples | Active campaigns, activated creators, reports generated | A creator refresh, an older-post pull, a live collector run |
| Where they are set | Plan defaults, with licence overrides | Plan grant each month, plus customer purchases |
| Unit | One object | One credit is one cent |
A customer can be far under every cap and still run out of credits, and the reverse.
What spends credits
- Refreshing a creator's profile or posts.
- Pulling older posts than the collector already has.
- A collector running live against a platform rather than the Cyrqle library.
Entries are recorded as: grant for the monthly plan grant, topup for a purchase, debit for a run, and refund for a run that failed or was aborted. Each entry is recorded once per run, so a retried run does not double charge.
Credits do not block today
Credit balances are informational in production right now. A low or negative balance does not stop a customer doing anything. Never tell a customer that their balance blocked them. Find the real cause.
Three groups are never metered at all, even when blocking is on: development deployments, demo workspaces, and any workspace whose licence carries the unlimited-credits feature.
There is no staff top-up button
Nothing in the console adds credits to a workspace. That is deliberate. Credits are bought by the customer through checkout, and granted monthly by the plan.
If a customer needs more credits, you have three answers:
- Send them to checkout. They buy a top-up from their own billing settings. This is the normal answer.
- Grant unlimited credits on their licence. This is the contract answer.
- Move them to contract overage settlement, so they keep spending and Cyrqle invoices later.
Grant unlimited credits
Open the licence
Find the workspace in /admin/licenses and open it.
Open the overrides editor
On the plan tab, find overrides, edit.
Turn on the feature
Set the unlimited-credits feature on in the features overrides.
Set an end date
Enter a valid-until date if the grant is temporary.
Save
Click save overrides.
Unlimited credits removes the meter, not the cost. Cyrqle still pays for every run. Grant it only where a contract covers it, and always set a valid-until date on a goodwill grant.
Spend stays visible after the grant. Debits are still recorded, so you can read what the workspace costs on the credit header and on /admin/ops/apify-spend.
Enterprise and agency plans already include unlimited credits. Check the plan before you add an override.
Overage settlement
Overage settlement decides what happens when a metered workspace runs out. There are three settings.
| Setting | What happens at the limit |
|---|---|
| blocked | The run is refused. The customer buys more credits |
| platform | Cyrqle absorbs spend up to a monthly ceiling you set |
| contract | The customer keeps spending and Cyrqle invoices them later |
- Customers can choose between blocked and platform for themselves. Only staff can set contract. That is the switch behind "unlimited, we invoice you later".
- Overage settlement is not available in the console today. It is an operations procedure run by engineering, using the same permission as licence overrides. Agree the ceiling in writing before you request it.
Platform invites
One related permission is granted the same way, through licence feature overrides: permission to mint platform-scope "Join Cyrqle" invite links. It is on no plan and is granted per workspace. Today only the Cyrqle house team has it.
Pitfalls
- Demo workspaces are never metered and never spend real money. A demo cannot prove that a credit path works.
- Cyrqle has no spend ceiling on outside data runs. Granting unlimited credits to a workspace that runs monitored collectors is an open-ended commitment. Check their collectors at /admin/ops/collectors first.