How billing works
Wallet, rates, and account states in browser-gateway/cloud.
Applies to app.browsergateway.com (cloud). The OSS browser-gateway npm package is free forever with no billing.
The model in one paragraph
No subscriptions. You start free. Everything that costs us real money (session recording, observability broadcast, BYOK usage above the monthly ceiling) draws from your wallet at a published per-unit rate. When you want more, you top up. The amount you top up is exactly the amount added to your wallet: we absorb the card processing cost. Our revenue comes from margin on the metered features you use. Your browser provider bill (Browserless, Steel, Browserbase, Lightpanda, Cloudflare Browser Rendering, or your own runtime) is separate.
Account states
| State | How you get here |
|---|---|
| Free | Signed up, no top-up yet. Uses free features up to fair-use limits. |
| Paid | You have credit balance greater than zero from a top-up. |
| Enterprise | You have a contract with us. Higher ceilings, custom retention, SSO, SLAs. |
You do NOT need to be on a specific "plan" to use the product. Every account gets free BYOK routing. Metered features unlock when your wallet has balance.
What every account gets for free
Free without any wallet balance:
- BYOK routing: 10,000 sessions per month included on your own browser providers.
- REST API calls (screenshot / content / scrape) count against the same 10,000-session ceiling.
- Bandwidth: unlimited, no meter.
- All routing strategies: priority-chain, round-robin, least-connections, weighted, latency-optimized.
- Multi-provider failover.
- Live playground.
- Up to 100 saved profiles, 10 MB per profile, 500 MB total per workspace.
- 60-day session log retention.
A zero-balance wallet does not unlock session recording, observability broadcast to external tools, or the account REST API.
What a positive wallet balance unlocks
Anything below requires wallet balance greater than zero. Charges draw at session close:
- Session recording at
$0.007per minute of encoded video, drawn from wallet. - Observability broadcast at
$0.05per 1,000 events, drawn from wallet. - Cloud REST API with a raised daily cap (100,000 calls/day up from 5,000).
- BYOK sessions above the 10,000/mo ceiling at
$0.0005per session, drawn from wallet. REST API calls count as sessions and share this ceiling.
What Enterprise adds
Enterprise is a contract, not a self-serve plan:
- Raised BYOK ceiling (contract-negotiated).
- Volume-based discounts on metered rates (recording, observability broadcast, BYOK overage).
- SSO / SAML.
- Admin controls.
- Custom retention: 60d, 90d, 180d, or 365d for session logs, replays, and observability.
- Contractual SLAs.
- Shared Slack support channel.
Per-unit pricing
| Item | Rate |
|---|---|
| BYOK routing (CDP + REST calls combined) | Free up to 10,000 sessions/mo, $0.0005/session above |
| Bandwidth | Free, unlimited |
| Session recording | $0.007 per minute of encoded video |
| Observability broadcast | $0.05 per 1,000 events |
| Wallet top-up fee | None. You pay what you top up. |
| Minimum top-up | $5 |
| Maximum top-up | $25,000 per transaction |
Wallet mechanics
- Wallet balance is denominated in US dollars.
- Purchased balance carries across periods.
- No signup credit.
- Refunds available within 24 hours of transaction, unused balance only.
- Payments processed by Paddle, our Merchant of Record.
Retention
Flat for all accounts. Enterprise contracts can extend.
| Resource | Retention |
|---|---|
| Session logs | 60 days |
| Session recordings | 30 days |
| Observability event traces | 60 days |
| Profiles | Kept indefinitely |
When your wallet hits zero
- Recording and observability broadcast requests return HTTP 402 at CDP connect time.
- BYOK routing continues free below the 10,000/mo ceiling.
- BYOK routing above the ceiling returns HTTP 402 until you top up.
- All other free features stay available.
Recordings and observability captures that were already in progress when the balance hit zero stop cleanly. The session itself keeps running.
Negative balance during a burst
Our enforcement runs at the edge with a cache that refreshes within about a minute. Under a burst of concurrent metered sessions right as your wallet hits zero, a small amount of usage can slip through before enforcement kicks in. Your balance will show as negative for the difference.
The negative balance is a record, not a bill: the next top-up deducts the negative amount before crediting your wallet. For example, a wallet at -$0.30 topped up by $5 becomes $4.70. No penalty, no separate invoice. This matches how OpenAI, Anthropic, and OpenRouter handle the same class of burst.
While your balance is negative, metered features (recording, observability, BYOK sessions above the monthly ceiling) return HTTP 402 at connect time until you top up. Free BYOK routing under the ceiling stays available.