Your monthly allowance

What this covers

The credits your subscription includes each month, when they arrive, and — the part worth reading — what happens to the ones you do not use. Requires the manage-billing permission.

What you get, and when

Some plans include a monthly SMS allowance. Yours is shown on Property Settings → SMS Credits in the Monthly Allowance card, which reads "Granted by your subscription plan on the 1st of each month."

That is exactly what happens: on the 1st, the allowance is added to your balance. If the card shows 0, your plan does not include one, and credit packs are your route to texting (link Buying credit packs).

You also receive an allowance when you first subscribe or change to a plan that includes one, so you are not waiting until the 1st to start.

Unused credits stay yours

This is the question everybody asks, and the answer is the generous one: unused credits are not taken away at the end of the month. They accumulate.

Your allowance is added to whatever you already hold. It does not replace it, and there is no expiry date on a credit from any source.

So a restaurant on a 500-credit allowance that sends 200 texts in January starts February with 300 left over, then gets another 500 — a balance of 800. A restaurant that sends nothing for six months simply has six months of allowance waiting.

Why this matters practically

It means you should never send texts just to use up an allowance. There is nothing to use up before a deadline. Turn on the message types that genuinely help your guests, and let the balance do whatever it does.

It also means a quiet season builds a buffer for a busy one, which is usually the way round a restaurant wants it.

Working out whether your allowance is enough

A rough estimate is easy, and rough is good enough to make a decision.

Take your bookings per month — not covers, bookings, since each booking gets its own messages.
Count how many SMS types you have switched on (confirmation, reminder, update, cancellation, waitlist).
Multiply. Then add a bit for updates and cancellations, which only affect some bookings.
Multiply again by your average cost per message — between 1 and 3 credits (link What an SMS costs in credits). Use 2 if you are unsure, or 3 if you get a lot of overseas guests.

A worked example

A restaurant taking 600 bookings a month with confirmations and reminders on, mostly local guests:

600 bookings × 2 message types = 1,200 messages
Plus roughly 10% for changes and cancellations = about 1,320
× 1 credit for local numbers = about 1,320 credits a month

If that restaurant's plan allows 500 a month, it is short by about 800 — so either drop to reminders only (which halves it), or buy a pack every couple of months.

Reminders alone is the highest-value choice if you need to economise. It is the message that reduces no-shows, and one text per booking is the cheapest way to get that benefit (link Reservation reminders).

Check your estimate against reality

After a month of real sending, stop estimating. Your credit history shows every message and its cost, so your actual monthly consumption is a matter of record rather than arithmetic — see Your credit history.

Good to know

The allowance is granted once per calendar month and cannot be granted twice, even if the monthly job runs again. You will never see a double top-up.

Changing plan changes your future allowance, not your balance. Credits you already hold — allowance or purchased — stay with you (link Changing your plan).

A suspended subscription stops the allowance. Credits are granted only to active subscriptions, so an unpaid invoice quietly stops the monthly top-up as well as everything else (link Payment failures and suspension).

The allowance appears in your history as a Monthly grant entry, described with the month it was for — so you can always confirm it arrived.