8. Pricing and balance

• Prepaid, by volume: buy credit packs in the console; each registered event consumes one credit. No plans, no lock-in, no surprises. See pricing.
• GET /account/balance returns the balance in credits.
• Test events cost nothing.
• Set balance alerts and, if you want, consumption limits per channel or key (warn or block): you control the spend.
• Or turn on automatic top-up: "when the balance drops below X credits, buy pack Y" with your default payment method at Safe Creative. We notify you of each top-up by email and webhook (recharge.auto_completed); if one fails, it is turned off without losing its settings and we notify you (recharge.auto_failed) so you can turn it back on once it is sorted out.

8.1 What if the balance runs out?

Your sequence does not break: events arriving with an exhausted balance are still received, sealed and chained, marked unpaid — up to a limit. While you have unpaid events:

• no certifications can be issued (account_not_operational — "account not operational");
• if the unpaid limit is reached, new registrations are rejected (unpaid_limit_exceeded).

When you top up, unpaid events are charged automatically and everything returns to normal — none of their proof elements changes. Recommendation: configure balance.low and never get here.

If a purchase is reverted after payment (a refund or a chargeback), its credits are deducted even if you had already spent them. The balance may then be negative: until the next purchase covers it, the account is not operational and new live events are received as unpaid, as above.

8.2 Unused accounts

An account that goes a year without registering events, requesting certifications (with a live or test key) or buying credits is disabled: the API rejects every call (403 account_disabled) and the console is unavailable. We email you 30 and 7 days before; any one of those operations restarts the period. Your data and certifications are kept, and issued certifications can still be verified. To reactivate it, contact support.