The IU plans and prices below are published and effective in production.
Every eligible organization can review and accept an applicable public plan;
no invitation or enrollment is needed. Accepting a paid plan starts billing
under its terms; every organization with an accepted paid plan is charged.
Existing accepted
media-pricing arrangements are unchanged. Your confirmation shows the exact
version, term, list price, and effective price that apply to you.
The short version
- Connecting costs nothing. Connecting an account, discovering it, and mapping it to an advertiser never consume IUs.
- You pay for successful work, priced by an activity term on the Rate Card you accepted. Attempts, retries, and our own failures are free.
- One plan for the whole organization. Buyer activity, Seller Account work, and Apostra draw from the same plan and the same wallet.
- You choose your plan; nobody is placed on one. An organization with no plan is asked to choose, and cannot add accounts until it does. Choosing the pay-as-you-go plan with no monthly commitment counts as choosing. Apostra refuses a Seller’s brief responses before a plan exists only where it has turned that on for the Seller; buyer activity is not refused.
- Every public plan is priced per IU. No public plan has a monthly commitment: you pay $5, €4.50 or £4 for each IU your activity uses, in your organization’s currency.
- Every charge traces back to a term you accepted, and you can read that trail yourself — see checking our numbers.
The seven steps
1
A price is published
Apostra publishes an immutable Rate Card revision: plan sizes, monthly
commitments, included IUs, activity prices, currencies, and an effective date.
Publishing a revision does not commit anyone to anything.You do: nothing.
2
Your Effective Rate Card is resolved
Your organization gets one Effective Rate Card — the complete commercial
result for you. It starts from a published plan and can include one authorized
adjustment: a corporate discount, a promotion or referral code, a negotiated
private package, or a customized Offer based on an exact Rate Card plan.You can check: the list price, the adjustment, and the effective price appear
side by side before you confirm. Discounts do not stack, and only one complete
offer is effective at a time.
3
An administrator accepts it
Only a verified organization administrator can accept a plan. An agent, API key,
service account, or support session cannot make that commitment on your behalf.Acceptance snapshots the exact agreement, revision, plan, adjustments, prices,
actor, and time into an immutable acceptance record. A later price change never rewrites
it — changes arrive as a new offer you can review.You do: review and accept, decline for that revision, or decide later. All
three are recorded; none of them is assumed. An organization with no plan
in force is asked again at its next sign-in, because a plan is required.
4
You give us a way to collect
Either save a card, or be set up for invoicing on your existing terms. This is
separate from accepting a plan. Once you have accepted a paid plan, charging
follows your plan’s terms; with a card saved, the card is charged
automatically.You do: add payment details in Settings → Plan & Billing.
5
You use IU-rated capabilities
When a capability has a published IU price, successful use draws from your plan.
Your wallet shows the balance, what consumed it, and a projection for the rest of
the period.Usage draws from expiring credit lots first, then rolled-over IUs, then the
period’s included allowance, then overage.You can check: usage appears on Usage & credits as it happens, attributed
to the activity that caused it.The activity list and daily trend are measured in IUs and reconcile to the
wallet’s IUs used total. They do not come from Apostra’s cost to run an AI
provider. A capability can incur an internal provider cost without consuming
a priced IU activity; in that case it does not appear as customer IU usage.
6
The cycle closes into an invoice
Each charged month produces one numbered fee invoice: plan commitment, overage as
IUs × your rate, and payments applied. Commitment and overage are switched on
separately, so an invoice can carry the commitment while overage is still only
accruing — see billing cycle and fee
invoices.You can check: invoice numbers are sequential with no gaps, and an issued
invoice’s charges never change. Payments are appended as they settle.
7
You reconcile it — and so do we
The invoice, the usage that produced it, and the term that priced it are the same
three records we reconcile internally. Nothing on your invoice should be
unexplainable from your own reads.You can check: see checking our numbers.
What consumes IUs, and what never does
One thing consumes IUs: successful activity that has a published price on the Rate Card your organization accepted. New Rate Cards use the three published v4 activities on the Organization IU Rate Card: Brief response, Enhanced Reporting, and Apostra media buy. Older accepted Rate Cards retain their own immutable activity terms. Everything below is always free, and stays free whether or not you have a paid plan:- connecting an account or an ad server;
- discovering accounts and mapping them to advertisers;
- reading, reporting, and exporting your own data, unless you enable Enhanced Reporting for a connected account;
- approving something we proposed;
- retries, routing, cache hits, and no-op work;
- anything that failed; and
- work caused by an Apostra defect.
The v4 activity schedule
New integrations can read the current three-activity catalog fromGET /api/v2/billing/iu-rate-card/v4. The response carries both the accepted
activityTerms and the resolved activitySchedule so a client can show the exact
price and boundary that govern the organization:
The unversioned,
/v2, and /v3 reads remain compatibility boundaries for clients
that use the older activity vocabulary; they do not add the v4 rows. Opt in to
/v4 before depending on these codes. An accepted Rate Card still freezes its
catalog version and resolved prices, so reading the newer endpoint never rewrites
an earlier agreement.
An Apostra media buy is charged to each side whose plan prices it, each under its
own plan and in its own billing period, so one buy can carry one buyer unit and
one seller unit.
- The buyer is charged 1 IU for each media buy that is active in a billing period, social buys included. A buy does not need to have delivered yet. It counts once it has left draft and the seller has accepted it: it is confirmed, active, paused, ending, or completed. It does not count while it is a draft or waiting for approval, if the seller rejects it, or if it is canceled before its flight starts.
- A buy running across a billing-period boundary counts in each period it is active. A buy that was already running is not charged for a new period it only spills into for less than 24 hours. Billing periods follow your organization’s IU billing cycle and are measured in UTC, so a flight that ends at 7 PM London time on the first day of a period (18:00 UTC in summer) is not charged for that period. The first period a buy is active always counts, however short.
- The seller is charged 1 IU for each non-social media buy with positive impressions or spend in a billing period.
- An organization that buys its own inventory is charged once. For a non-social buy that is the seller’s charge, so it applies only in a billing period in which the buy has positive impressions or spend; a buy of your own inventory that has not delivered in a period is not charged for that period. A social buy of your own inventory is charged once, as the buyer’s charge.
- A buy that carries a percentage-of-media fee above 0% (for example, a buy created at 8% under earlier terms) finishes under that fee and is not charged to the buyer as an IU. A buy created at 0% is charged normally.
sandbox: true), or from a buyer account that cannot book media
yet, is never charged. Enhanced Reporting is charged
to the organization that owns the connected account.
For the seller’s media-buy unit, the latest authoritative delivery totals control
the result. If both impressions and spend become zero before invoicing, the
provisional IU is removed. The buyer’s unit is checked against the buy’s status
and dates instead: if the seller rejects the buy, or it is canceled before its
flight started, the buyer’s provisional IU is removed before invoicing. After
invoicing, the same correction produces an auditable one-IU credit or reversal
against the original period. A later correction can reinstate that same unit
once, but cannot create a second unit for the buy and period. See the
complete activity schedule
for all qualification details.
What a plan with no monthly commitment charges for
A plan with no monthly commitment, such as Connect & Buy for a buyer or Storefront agent for a seller, charges nothing to hold. You pay only when an activity in the plan’s schedule happens, and only for an activity the Rate Card publishes with a price. The plan chooser lists these charges from the same schedule, so it never shows a charge, or a price, that is not on the Rate Card revision offered to you.- As a buyer, you pay when a media buy you place is active in a billing period, whether or not it has delivered yet, and when you turn on Enhanced Reporting for a connected account.
- As a seller on Storefront agent, you pay for every brief you run and for each non-social media buy that delivers, when the plan charges for them. The Rate Card’s schedule says which of these a plan charges for.
- Listing is free. It has no monthly commitment and no IU price, so the chooser lists no charges for it.
GET /api/v2/billing/iu-rate-card/v4.
Standard prices
Every public plan has no monthly commitment and no included IUs. You pay for each IU your activity uses, at the price for your organization’s currency:
The prices are per IU. Listing has no IU price, so it charges nothing.
This is the standard list, not everyone’s price. Your Effective Rate Card is the
authority. An authorized corporate discount, a promotion or referral code, a
negotiated private package, or a customized Offer replaces these figures, and Plan &
Billing shows the list price and the effective price side by side before you confirm.
If your organization has been quoted something else, that quote — once it is an
Effective Rate Card you accept — governs your charges, not this table.
Prices are set per currency, never converted. Each currency’s price is its own
published number on the Rate Card revision, not the USD figure at an exchange rate,
which is why the EUR and GBP prices are not $5.00 converted. Your organization’s
currency is fixed on the revision you accept, and your invoice, charge, and wallet
all use it.
And these are today’s standard figures. Standard prices can change, and when they
do they arrive as a new published revision — never as an edit to a revision
anyone accepted. Your acceptance record snapshots the exact version, term, and prices
you agreed to, so a change to this table does not change what you are paying: you
would see a successor offer and decide whether to accept it.
To work out a month’s cost on a standard plan, multiply the IUs used by your
currency’s price:
Worked examples
A seller on Storefront agent, in USD
A seller on Storefront agent, in USD
Runs 12 briefs in the month.No commitment and no included allocation. Every IU is $5.00.
A buyer on Connect & Buy, in EUR
A buyer on Connect & Buy, in EUR
Has 8 media buys active in the month and Enhanced Reporting turned on for one
connected account.The organization’s currency is EUR, so every IU is €4.50, not $5.00 converted.
Paying by card, the charge is taken when it crosses the account’s threshold
during the month, and the remainder settles when the cycle closes.
Your first plan — the setup credit
Your first plan — the setup credit
Whether you receive a setup credit depends on the Rate Card you accept. Plan &
Billing shows the credit, if there is one, before you accept. A Rate Card that
carries no setup credit grants none, and the rest of this section does not apply.
The current plans carry no setup credit, so accepting one grants none. An
organization that already holds a credit keeps it until it expires, whichever
Rate Card it was granted under.When the Rate Card carries one, a seller billing organization receives the amount
and validity the Rate Card states on its first IU plan acceptance. You do not have to be a new customer — if you have been with us a
while and are accepting an IU plan for the first time, the credit is yours too.It can be spent on any IU-priced activity. The window is a fixed number of days
from your signup commit, as the Rate Card states, not a number of billing periods, so it does not shift with
your billing cycle and you never need to know where your cycle boundary falls.
Usage & credits shows the exact expiry date.One credit per billing organization: later Seller Accounts do not create another. It
does not roll over, has no cash value, and does not stack.
Reading your invoice
Every charged month produces one numbered fee invoice on Settings → Plan & Billing → Payment & invoices, showing:- the plan commitment, if your plan has one, at the price fixed in your accepted terms;
- overage as a quantity of IUs multiplied by your plan’s rate;
- payments applied, as they settle.
When a card payment settles before the cycle closes
A card payment can succeed during the month before its fee invoice is issued. The payment stays attached to that exact billing cycle and is recorded against what you owe Apostra for IU fees, so the amount still owed falls as soon as the payment succeeds. A retry or pay now recovery replaces the failed attempt with the successful payment on the same cycle; it does not create a second cycle or detach the payment from its usage. When the cycle closes, Apostra issues its invoice from the frozen usage drawdown and accepted plan terms, including payment applications for successful charges. Apostra’s billing checks compare those records with successful charges and invoice arithmetic for differences. If Apostra pauses charging after a payment was collected, no new charge is made, but that paid cycle still closes and the accounting checks continue so the payment is not left without an invoice. For day-to-day billing, nothing changes: finance teams can use the numbered invoice and its applied payments as their audit trail, while smaller teams can continue using Plan & Billing without a new setup step.If a payment fails
A published recovery ladder applies: automatic retries on a schedule, email notices, and a self-serve pay now action that clears the failed-payment status as soon as it succeeds. Plan & Billing reports an unresolved dunning-backed hold; reaching the account’s cap records a separate internal hold. In the current alpha, neither hold is consulted by a production authorization path, so it does not automatically block new paid platform activity. Viewing your data, reporting, exporting, and fixing your payment method remain available.Checking our numbers
You should not have to take an invoice on trust. These reads are the same records the charge was built from:
Authenticate with
Authorization: Bearer $SCOPE3_API_KEY. Agents should use the typed
open_iu_plan_task and get_billing_account tools rather than reconstructing
this from generic calls.
The reconciliation you can do yourself: the IU quantity on an invoice line should
equal the usage attributed to that activity for the period, priced at the rate on your
accepted terms. If those three do not agree, that is a defect on our side — tell us and we
will explain the difference rather than adjust the invoice quietly.
Two bills, kept separate
IUs price platform activity. Media spend and its accepted contract fee terms are a separate commercial stream on a separate bill. Plan & Billing can show both, because an organization may owe both, but neither replaces or silently amends the other.Related
Organization IU Rate Card
The price list, adjustments, rollover, and acceptance in detail
Plan & Billing
The surface where you review terms, usage, and invoices
Pay by card
Saving a card, thresholds, and the recovery ladder
Media billing
How media spend is invoiced, and where remittance details come from