Wallet: top-ups, auto top-up, spend cap and the ledger

Dashboard → Wallet is owner-only. A member of the account doesn't see the Wallet link in the nav, and the page itself 404s for them. For how billing charges (the rate, the GB-hour unit), see the FAQ on /pricing. This article covers what's on this page, not the pricing model.

Adding funds

The Add funds control opens a Paddle checkout overlay with card, PayPal, Google Pay or Apple Pay. Paddle shows the ones available in your country and on your device. Pick a preset ($5/$10/$20/$50) or type a custom whole-dollar amount from $5 to $100; both the button and the server reject anything outside that range. The balance updates once the payment clears. The panel also refreshes itself as soon as the checkout overlay reports success, so you don't need to reload by hand.

Auto top-up

This never charges your card automatically. With it on, when your balance drops below a threshold you pick ($1/$2/$5), the platform emails you a link that opens a prefilled checkout for the amount you pick ($5/$10/$20). You still click through and pay. If your account is linked to Discord, you additionally get a DM about the same event. The DM comes on top of the email, not instead of it, and it carries no link or prefilled amount; it tells you to open Wallet → Auto top-up in the panel yourself. Notices are capped at one a day and three per low-balance episode, plus a monthly cap you set (its options stay at or above your top-up amount, so "$10/$20/$50" is the full list only at $5). Two quieter gates apply too: your email must be verified, and the account needs at least one server. If either is unmet, no notice fires regardless of balance.

Monthly spend cap

This is a separate control from the wallet balance: a ceiling ($1–$1000) on how much you let metered billing spend in a UTC calendar month. It does nothing to flat-plan servers, which are billed a different way (see below). When you reach the cap, every metered server on the account hibernates, the same way it does at a $0 balance (below), and stays that way for the rest of the month. New starts and wake-on-join are refused with "monthly spend cap reached" until either the month rolls over or you raise the cap. Raising it doesn't restart anything by itself; the next start or join then works normally. Turning the cap off entirely never touches your balance. It only removes the ceiling.

Reading the ledger

The last 50 transactions, newest first, labeled by what produced them: Paddle top-up for a completed Paddle payment (card, PayPal or wallet); Usage — (metered), a same-day rollup of that server's metered charges, one row per day rather than per 60-second tick; Daily flat charge — , one row for each day a flat-plan server ran (flat is priced monthly and billed in daily installments, and a fully-stopped day isn't charged); Welcome credit; and Admin adjustment, a manual correction support applied and the only row type that means that. Also labeled: Referral reward (someone you invited topped up), Referral bonus (your own credit for joining through an invite), Refund / chargeback (a debit: money leaving the balance after a card refund) and RAM upgrade — rest of today, the one-off proration when you resize a flat-plan server mid-day. One row type still renders without a clean label: a redeemed promo code shows as a plain Top-up (only an actual Paddle payment says "Paddle top-up"). This may not be a complete list of every row kind that exists. Positive amounts (green) are money in; negative ones, including usage, flat charges, and refunds, are money out.

What happens at zero balance

Metered billing debits the wallet every 60 seconds, billed per GB-hour of RAM, and the ledger collapses that into one "Usage" row per day rather than 1,440 rows (see above). Flat is charged per UTC day a server runs, by a pass that checks every hour. Either way, the moment a charge takes the balance to zero or below, that server hibernates on the spot, by the same mechanism as the spend cap above. From there, no path back in works while the balance is non-positive: not a manual Start, not Restart, not a player's wake-on-join. The platform checks the balance before running any of them, not only at the periodic charge. Top up past zero and the next attempt (a manual Start, or a player joining if wake-on-join is on) starts it normally.

Troubleshooting

Auto top-up is on but no email (or Discord DM) arrived. Check the balance threshold and the rate limit first (one notice a day, three per low-balance episode; a recent notice for the same dip explains a missing second one), then the two quieter gates: your email needs to be verified, and the account needs at least one server. Either unmet condition skips the notice with no error shown anywhere.

A server won't start and there's money in the wallet. Check the monthly spend cap above. A reached cap can block a metered server even with a positive balance, and it shows its own "monthly spend cap reached" message, distinct from an empty-wallet refusal.

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