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This page is the walkthrough: what happens between a published price and a charge on your account, what you do at each step, and what you can check afterwards. If you only want the price list, the Organization IU Rate Card has it.
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 bind 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, storefront 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 an enterprise offer.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 binding. 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.You can check: usage appears on Usage & credits as it happens, attributed to the activity that caused it.
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.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. 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;
  • approving something we proposed;
  • retries, routing, cache hits, and no-op work;
  • anything that failed; and
  • work caused by a Scope3 defect.
The order of operations is fixed: zero-rate first, then credits, then bill. If it is ambiguous whether something should be charged, it resolves free.

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.
On a committed plan, unused included IUs carry into the next monthly period only, up to 50% of that next period’s included quantity — at most 125 IUs on the 250 plan, 500 on the 1,000 plan. Carried IUs expire after that one period and never accumulate again. Pay as you go has no allocation to carry.

Calculator

Enter the IUs you expect to use in a month. The cost of each plan is shown, with the cheapest one marked. 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

Uses 12 IUs in the month.
No commitment, no included allocation, nothing to roll over. Every IU is $5.00.
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.
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.
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 storefronts 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 binding;
  • overage as a quantity of IUs multiplied by your plan’s rate;
  • payments applied, as they settle.
Two properties are worth relying on. Invoice numbers are sequential with no gaps, so you can tell whether you have seen every invoice. And an issued invoice’s charges never change — a correction arrives as its own document, never as an edit to one you have already received. Organizations paying by card are charged automatically. Invoiced organizations receive the fee invoice only and pay on their existing terms; no card charge is made.

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 everything at once as soon as it succeeds. While a failure is unresolved — or if accrued, uncollected overage reaches your account’s cap — new paid platform activity is held. Viewing your data, reporting, exporting, and fixing your payment method are never blocked.

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 get_iu_rate_card_offer 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 binding. 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.

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