Usage & billing

This page covers the hosted service at https://app.ergomem.com. A self-hosted deployment (see Install) has no plans or billing — every tenant there is unmetered unless an operator explicitly configures it.

Plans

Reads are always free — plans and credits only ever apply to guarded writes. "Grandfathered" covers any account that predates plan metering; it's never metered, no matter how much it writes.

What's metered

A guarded write is a remember, learn, or supersede call that actually runs the contradiction guard — including a blocked 409 conflict, since the refusal is still the gate doing its job. An unauthenticated, rate-limited, or malformed request (401/429/400/413) never reaches the gate, so it's never counted.

Never metered, on any plan: recall, why, active, history, diagnose (all reads), and retract (pure removal, runs no gate).

If a write would exceed both the monthly allowance and your credit balance (see below), it's refused before anything is stored — nothing is written and that refused request doesn't itself count toward the cap.

Limits are enforced in this order: authentication, then rate limit, then the monthly write cap, then the active-claims cap.

Monthly reset

The monthly guarded-write count resets at the start of every UTC calendar month — resets_at is always the first instant of the next month (YYYY-MM-01T00:00:00Z). The project-count limit doesn't reset monthly; it's just a ceiling on how many projects exist at once, and an existing project keeps working even if you're later on a lower plan.

Credits

Credits are a persistent balance that never expires — they survive a plan change or cancellation, and are only touched once your plan's monthly allowance for the current month is exhausted. A guarded write always drains the monthly allowance first; a credit is spent only after that, one credit per guarded write (a blocked 409 still spends one, same as a stored write).

Once both the monthly allowance and your credit balance hit zero, further guarded writes are refused with monthly_write_limit_reached until the next monthly reset or a credit top-up — there's no overdraft. Grandfathered accounts never touch credits at all.

Credit packs:

Autoload

Autoload is an opt-in, off-by-default automatic top-up: when enabled, it watches your credit balance and — once it drops below a threshold you set — charges a saved card for one credit pack and adds those credits automatically.

• Off by default; you turn it on explicitly and choose the threshold and pack.
• Requires a saved card on file.
• Credits are added only once the charge is confirmed by the payment webhook — never optimistically at charge time.
• A failed charge (declined card, etc.) adds nothing and is surfaced as a visible failure rather than retried in a loop; you stay eligible for the next scheduled check.

Team invites

Team-plan orgs can invite teammates into their org from the Team page in the app. Free and Pro stay single-owner (1 seat).

• Owner-only. Whoever was first mapped into your org (from signup) is the owner; only the owner can invite or remove teammates. There's no ownership-transfer step today.
• Invite by email — no separate signup, no invite email. Enter a teammate's email and they get member access immediately. Tell them directly to open the app and sign in with that email; the app doesn't send them anything on your behalf.
• 10 seats by default, including the owner. Hitting the cap returns a "seat limit reached" error — remove a teammate to free a seat, or re-invite an existing member (that never costs a seat).
• Removal is immediate and can't be undone. The owner can remove any teammate except themselves; a removed teammate loses access right away.

Notifications

A few account-critical events send you an email — these aren't marketing email and there's no opt-out for them:

Payment- and autoload-failure emails are sent when the underlying charge fails. Quota-approaching emails are checked whenever anyone on your org opens the usage page, and are sent at most once per threshold per billing cycle.

Where to see and manage this

Your live usage (writes used this month, credit balance, current plan) and billing (buy credits, enable autoload, change plan) are on the usage page in the app; team management is on the team page.