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 actually charges — the rate, the GB-hour unit — see /pricing's FAQ; this article covers what's on this page, not the pricing model.

Adding funds

The Add funds control opens a Paddle checkout overlay (card, via Paddle). 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. Turning it on means: 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 — that's on top of the email, not instead of it, and the DM itself carries no link or prefilled amount; it just tells you to open Wallet → Auto top-up in the panel yourself. Capped at one notice a day, three per low-balance episode, plus a monthly cap you set (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 — either unmet, and no notice fires regardless of balance.

Monthly spend cap

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, billed a different way entirely (see below). Reach the cap and every metered server on the account hibernates — the same way a $0 balance does, 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 just removes the ceiling.

Reading the ledger

The last 50 transactions, newest first, labeled by what produced them: Card top-up for a completed Paddle payment; Usage — (metered), a same-day rollup of that server's metered charges — one row per day, not per 60-second tick; Daily flat charge — , one row per day a flat-plan server actually ran (flat is priced monthly, billed in daily installments; 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. A few real row types render without a clean label yet, credits and debits alike: a redeemed promo code shows as a plain Top-up (only an actual card payment says "Card top-up"); a referral reward shows as the raw referral_reward · referral_reward:<id>; and a Paddle refund or chargeback — a debit, money leaving the balance — shows as the raw refund · paddle:<id>. All are genuine ledger events, just not labeled nicely yet, and 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 (collapsed into one "Usage" ledger row per day, not 1,440 rows — see above); flat billing runs once a day, for servers that ran that day. Either way, the moment a charge would take the balance to zero or below, that server hibernates on the spot — 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, nothing — the platform checks the balance before running any of them, not just the periodic charge. Top up past zero and the next attempt (manual or a player joining) 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 one 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 metered server can be blocked by a reached cap even with a positive balance, with its own "monthly spend cap reached" message distinct from an empty-wallet refusal.

Add funds does nothing / a "payments unavailable" message appears. Paddle's checkout script is commonly blocked by ad-blockers — disable it for this site and reload.