Credit

Every account can buy Credit, Hobby included. Paid plans draw eligible Trial credit first, then Credit for execution beyond their included amounts. Credit also pays another account's priced tool on every plan; see Priced calls. Credit alone does not extend hosting on Hobby. Credit and Trial credit cannot be transferred between accounts.

Plan resource budgets reset each billing period and do not carry over. See Plans for their included amounts.

Plan Credit returns

Go returns no Credit. Pro and Scale each return $10 per paid subscription period, after payment succeeds. Each subscribing account receives its own return; an organization shares it across its members. Mid-period upgrades add the prorated difference, and payment retries never issue duplicate returns.

Returns enter ordinary Credit and can buy priced calls or cover paid-plan execution beyond included budgets. New returns expire at the end of the subscription billing period they cover, with no rollover. Prorated upgrade returns expire at that same period end. For a January 31–February 28 paid period, the return expires at the February 28 renewal boundary, even if payment arrives late.

Billing identifies each plan return and its expiry alongside purchases. Existing grants keep their issued expiry dates. Cancellation stops future returns and preserves issued deadlines; a deleted account cannot spend its retained balance. Subscription refund requests are handled manually by email.

Trial credit

GitHub verification issues one $1 grant valid for 30 days. Data is kept for 30 days after credit exhaustion or expiry. Deployments can configure these terms; the current offer appears before verification. The grant keeps its issued terms; retries, plan changes and cancellation never replenish it.

Trial credit pays for running the account's services. It cannot pay priced tools, subscriptions or payouts. Included storage does not consume it.

Billing and crab billing show Trial credit separately from Credit, with its expiry. The available balance excludes funds reserved for running or unsettled work. An invocation reserves funds before it runs; unused funds return to their original unexpired grant. An unknown outcome remains reserved.

Further trial-funded calls are refused when available funds cannot cover admission. Hobby receives no credit grace period; continued hosting after trial funds end requires a paid plan. Services pause and data is retained for 30 days by default, until the recovery deadline shown in Billing and Usage, then deleted. Accounts returning from a paid plan also enter recovery without execution funding, even if they never received trial credit. Pending execution reservations defer recovery while their funds remain valid; they do not extend expired grants.

Buying credit

• Any amount from $20, bought on the account's Billing page. An agent never pays: crab billing credit prints a link to a page where a person signed in buys it, with --for saying what it is for, and crab request <code> --wait returns once they have.
• Last 12 months: each purchase or refill expires a year after it is bought. Within eligible Credit, the grant expiring soonest is spent first, including plan returns.
• Not refundable, not transferable, and spent only on CrabTalk.

The Billing page separates Credit and Trial credit grant history. Each shows its remaining grants and expiry, plus monthly credit issued, execution spending, tool-price spending, expiry and closing balance.

Auto-refill

• On a paid plan, set on the account's Billing page or with crab billing refill --amount <usd> --cap <usd>; off until you turn it on.
• Buys the amount you set, $20 or more, when credit runs low.
• Never spends more in a UTC month than the cap you set. A cap of 0 turns it off.

When Credit runs out on a paid plan

1. Your services keep running for 24 hours.
2. Then calls to your services are refused, and crons and wakes wait. Your services and their data are kept.
3. What those 24 hours used is charged with your next payment.

Buying credit ends the wait at once.

Priced calls

A tool with a price charges it to the calling account's credit: the org an API key is bound to, else the person, or for an app's call, the app's owner. The service's owner and its org's members are never charged.

• The price is held before the call. A caller whose credit is short of it is refused with 402, naming the price.
• A call that answers done keeps the charge. A failure, a refusal or a timeout returns it.
• crab usage and the Usage page list the prices paid this period, by service and tool. What a service's owner earns from them: Earnings.
• What one call costs, its price and its cost to run: Cost of a call.

Unit rates

The rate of each unit is on Pricing.

Memory held is charged at each tool's budget for as long as a call runs, including time waiting on a fetch or another service.