Documentation · Budgets and billing

Budgets and plans

Pick how fast your agents may spend, what each plan buys, how agents pace work through the month, and what happens when the budget or balance runs low.

Budget and balance

Two things control what your agents spend:

• Your budget (also called your plan) sets the pace. It is a number of credits an hour, day, week or month. You set it per site in Settings.
• Your balance is the prepaid credits on your account. It caps spending. You add to it on Billing. 1 credit is $1.

Each site has its own budget and its own on/off switch. All your sites share one balance. One site's work never uses another site's budget.

The budget is also the switch. Any budget above zero turns agents on. A budget of 0 (Off) turns them off.

A bigger budget buys more frequent and more careful work. It never buys cheaper work. Agents work at the quality your plan sets. When the budget or balance is short, they wait. They never switch to lighter work to fit.

The plans

Pick one of four presets, or set your own.

Every plan gets the whole team. A bigger budget keeps more of them busy and reads more of your site each run. See Meet the agents.

What each plan card shows

In Settings, each preset card shows:

• The name and N credits a month.
• A picture of the agent crew, with how many agents are busy on a typical day. Busy agents are awake. The rest are faded and asleep, waiting for the next review.
• The quality: Basic quality, Standard quality, High quality or Best quality.
• The plan's promise.
• Five estimates for your site's size:
  • Reviews: how many review runs you get in a month.
  • Pages per run: how many pages each review reads.
  • Whole site: how often the agents get through your whole site.
  • Research: how widely the content review looks for new pages to add, Usual or wider.
  • Credits used: a typical month's use, shown as "About X of Y".

These are estimates. They are worked out for your site's real size, so they change as your site grows.

On a small site, a bigger plan may do no more than the one below it. That card then says it's More than a site this size needs and names the cheaper plan that covers your site as often and as widely. Pick the cheaper plan unless you want room to grow.

On a very small site, even the widest research may not use the whole budget. That card then says how many credits of useful work your site has a month. The rest stays in your balance, and new agents use it as they join.

Custom budgets

On the Custom card, type a whole number of credits from 0 to 100,000. Then pick a window: an hour, a day, a week or a month.

The window only changes how the budget is written. A month counts as 30 days. So 5 credits a day is the same pace as 150 credits a month, and 1 credit an hour is the same as 720 credits a month.

The quality follows the monthly amount your budget adds up to:

For example, 5 credits a day adds up to 150 a month, so it gets High quality. Home shows it as "Budget: Custom · High work · 5 credits a day".

The presets are always monthly.

What needs at least 100 credits a month

Some deeper work only runs on a budget of at least 100 credits a month (Climb, Canopy, or a Custom budget that adds up to 100 or more). This covers the heavier work that follows a full crawl of your site: the page design check, the design advice and the site crawl review.

On a smaller budget, that work waits with the message "This work needs a budget of at least 100 credits a month." Everything else still runs.

Budget also sets how often the free crawl and speed tests run. Below 100 credits a month they run about every 30 days. From 100 they run about every two weeks. From 300 they run every week.

How agents pace spending

Think of your budget as a bucket. It refills at your budget's rate, hour by hour. Each agent job takes its cost out of the bucket before it starts.

The bucket holds about a day's worth of your budget. If the largest single job your plan runs costs more than that, the bucket holds a little more than one of those jobs instead, so a small budget saves up for a review rather than never affording one.

How full the bucket is decides what may run now:

The reserve for approved work

One tenth of the bucket is kept back for work you approved. Other jobs can't dip into it. So when you approve a fix on Approvals, it can start even when the rest of the budget is used up. Approved work can run at every level of the bucket.

Turning agents off and on doesn't refill the bucket

The bucket is worked out from what your agents actually spent over the last few weeks. Saving your plan again, or turning agents off and on, doesn't top it up. A higher budget refills it faster.

What waiting looks like

When the bucket is too low for a job, the job waits. You see the reason on Home under Now as Waiting, and across the top of the Agents page. The messages read like:

• "The budget is paced for now; more work starts in about 5 hours."
• "The budget is used for now; this job starts in about 2 days."

The time can also read "within the hour" or "when the budget is raised". You don't need to do anything. Work starts on its own when the bucket refills. To speed things up, raise your budget.

What a typical month uses

Agents plan a typical month to use about 90% of your budget. The rest is room for the fixes you approve and for the odd job that costs more. Your budget is still the limit: agents never spend more than it.

A bigger budget is used in this order: reviews run more often, up to every day; then each review reads more of your site; then more reviews a day, each on the next part of your site or a different kind of review; then the content review studies more competitors and more searches for new-page ideas. You still see only the best few ideas. On a small site, where each review already reads every page, budget that isn't enough for the next step up in how often reviews run goes to wider research instead. None of this lowers the quality your budget sets.

On a very small site, a big budget can run out of useful work: every page is read every day and the research is as wide as it goes. That is why Credits used can show well under your budget there.

As a rough example, on a 50-page site:

And on a 1,000-page site, where the same budget covers the site less often:

Your own plan cards in Settings show the estimates for your site. Trust those over this table.

How the pricing page recommends a plan

On the pricing page, move the Your site slider to your site's size, from 10 to 10,000 pages. It starts at 50. Each card updates to show what it buys for a site that size.

The page recommends:

1. The cheapest preset that covers your whole site within 7 days.
2. If none does, Canopy, as long as it covers your site within 30 days.
3. If even Canopy can't, Enterprise. See Enterprise.

The recommended card carries a Recommended badge. Press Start with this budget, or Start with and a plan's name, to sign up with that budget. You can also type your own monthly budget on the Custom card.

When you sign up, you pay your monthly budget in dollars as prepaid credits, between $10 and $500. The plan is saved with agents off. They start when you pick a plan in Settings, or when you skip the first report during onboarding and press Start agents. See Sign up and Turn agents on.

Change your budget

Only the account owner can change the budget.

1. Open Settings. Make sure the right site is chosen in the Site menu. You can also click Change budget on Home.
2. Under Agents, pick Seedling, Sprout, Climb, Canopy or Custom. For Custom, type the credits and pick the window.
3. Click Start agents (if agents are off) or Save (if they are on).
4. You see "Saved. Agents follow the new settings from their next job."

The saved plan shows a Current pill while agents are on.

If the number isn't valid you see "That budget didn’t save. Enter whole credits from 0 to 100,000, then pick a window."

Turn agents off

Pick Off and click Save. Nothing new runs or spends on that site, including the free daily checks. A job that had already started when you turned agents off still finishes, and its cost comes from your balance. Nothing new starts after it. Reports still run. Home shows "Budget: none, agents off".

New sites

A site you add starts with its own plan, switched off. It never starts spending at another site's budget. See Sites.

Enterprise sites

An Enterprise site runs on Canopy and Ivy Link pays for its work. The plan cards are greyed out. You only get Turn agents on and Turn agents off. The budget still paces the work, but the balance never stops it. When Enterprise ends, agents switch off and go back to your earlier plan, paid from your credits once you turn them on.

When the budget or balance runs out

These are two different things.

The budget runs low. Work waits until the bucket refills, as described under "What waiting looks like" above. Nothing is wrong. Agents are on and your balance is fine.

The balance runs out. Before each job, agents check that your balance covers it. If auto top-up is on, it tops up first. If the balance still can't pay, agents pause:

• Home shows the Agents paused pill.
• Needs you on Home gets an Add credits item: "Agents are paused until the balance covers the next job".
• The Agents page shows a notice like "Agents are paused: your balance is 0.4 credits and this job needs about 1.5. They start again when credits are added." with an Add credits link. The paid agents show Paused.

To get them going again:

1. Click Add credits, or go to Billing.
2. Add credits, or turn on auto top-up.
3. Agents start again on their own as soon as the balance covers the next job. They pick up at the same quality as before.

While paused for balance, the free daily checks keep running. They never touch your balance. They only stop when you turn agents off.

Emails about your balance

We send each of these emails at most once each time your balance dips:

• Your Ivy Link balance is low: after the next job, your balance would cover less than about a week of your agents' work at your current budget.
• Your Ivy Link agents are paused: your balance doesn't cover the next job.

Both link to Billing. We don't send them while auto top-up is on and working. Once your balance recovers, the next dip will email you again. See Emails.

On Billing, when auto top-up is off, the balance card also says Balance is low once you are under $5.

Read what you have spent

On Billing

Open Billing. See the Billing page for the full tour.

The Activity table lists "Credits added and work spent, last 90 days." Filter it with All, Added or Usage. Each usage row is a Site report, the name of an agent job (such as "Technical review"), or Agent work.

Before a job starts, it sets aside the most it might cost. When it finishes, you pay what it actually used.

On Home

Home shows your budget in a line such as "Budget: Sprout · Standard work · 30 credits a month", and N credits left with a Top up link.

In Settings

The Credits used line on each plan card is an estimate of a typical month, not what you spent. Use Billing for real spend.

Reports are separate

A report is paid from your balance, but not from your agent budget, so it doesn't slow your agents' pace. Each depth has a set price. Your balance must cover that price before the report starts, and you are charged only for what the report actually uses, never more than the price. See Report depths and Credits.

Last updated October 31, 2026

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