The IU plans and prices below are agreed and published for a controlled
staging pilot. They are not published in production, so no organization
needs to accept them in production today and no IU charges are being made.
Existing accepted media-pricing arrangements are unchanged. When your
organization is invited, your confirmation shows the exact version, term, list
price, and effective price that would 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 Murph draw from the same plan and the same wallet.
- A commitment lowers the per-IU price. Usage beyond your included IUs bills at the metered rate.
- 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
Scope3 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.
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: accepting a plan does not by itself start
charging, and charging is switched on per organization, never silently.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 Scope3’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 Interchange 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 a Scope3 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.
For Interchange media buys, the latest authoritative delivery totals control the
result. If both impressions and spend become zero before invoicing, the provisional
IU is removed. After invoicing, the same correction produces an auditable one-IU
credit or reversal against the original period. A later positive 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.
Plan shapes
Two break-even points fall out of those numbers, and they are worth knowing before
you choose:
- Above 200 IUs a month, the 250 plan costs less than pay as you go.
- Above 650 IUs a month, the 1,000 plan costs less than the 250 plan.
Calculator
Enter the IUs you expect to use in a month. The cost of each plan is shown, with the cheapest one marked. This computes the standard USD list and is not a quote. If your organization has a corporate discount, a negotiated package, a customized Offer, or a card in another currency, put the numbers from your own Effective Rate Card into the formula below — prices are published per currency rather than converted from USD. The formula, if you would rather compute it yourself or have an agent do it:carried_in is the smaller of last period’s unused included IUs and half of this
period’s included quantity.
Worked examples
A seller trying things out — pay as you go
A seller trying things out — pay as you go
Uses 12 IUs in the month.No commitment, no included allocation, nothing to roll over. Every IU is $5.00.
A buyer who went over — the 250 plan
A buyer who went over — the 250 plan
Committed to 250 IUs for $1,000. Uses 310 IUs, with nothing carried in.Because they are on a card, the $300 of overage is charged when it crosses the
account’s threshold during the month rather than arriving as a surprise at close.
The remainder settles when the cycle closes.
A quiet month, then a busy one — rollover
A quiet month, then a busy one — rollover
On the 250 plan. Period 1 uses 180 of 250 IUs.Period 2 has 250 included + 70 carried = 320 IUs before any overage. If they use
300, the invoice is the $1,000 commitment and no overage. The 20 IUs left over
from the carried lot expire — carried IUs do not carry again.
Your first plan — the 100-IU credit
Your first plan — the 100-IU credit
A seller billing organization receives one 100-IU credit, valid for 60 days,
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 60 days from
your signup commit, 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, 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 as deferred until the cycle closes. 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, Scope3 issues its invoice from the frozen usage drawdown and accepted plan terms, including payment applications for successful charges. Collected payments are then recognized as revenue. Separately, Scope3’s billing checks compare those records with successful charges and invoice arithmetic for differences. If charging is turned off 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