Most of Appmint is covered by your plan. Services that cost us money when you use them — AI, SMS, voice, email, shipping labels — are charged against a balance on your organization.
This page explains how that charge is calculated.
Balance
Your organization holds a balance. Metered services draw from it, and you top it up.
Alongside the balance, your organization carries a plan and a spend rate, which together decide what a given unit of usage actually costs you.
What you are charged
A charge is built in three steps.
1. Provider cost. What the underlying provider charges us for that specific call. For AI this is calculated from the actual input and output tokens for the specific model, or per image for image generation. For messaging and shipping it is the provider's own per-unit price.
2. Platform markup. A configured markup on top of the provider cost. Markup is set per service, not globally, and can be a percentage, a fixed amount, both, or none at all.
3. Your rate. Your plan's spend rate is applied to arrive at what is deducted.
The result is the sales price, and that is what is checked against your balance and deducted from it.
Markup varies by service
Markup is deliberately not uniform. As currently configured:
| Service type | Markup |
|---|---|
| AI providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek) | +20% |
| Twilio SMS | +50% |
| EasyPost shipping | +50% |
| Amazon SES email | +30% |
| Voice — Twilio inbound/outbound, AI realtime | +100% |
| Phone numbers, bulk email, Maps lookups | None — passed through at cost |
Full per-service and per-model rates are in service rates.
The agreement you accept for a service states its markup explicitly. The Anthropic agreement, for example, states that a 20% platform fee applies on top of Anthropic's base rates. You are not asked to accept an undisclosed rate.
Bring your own credentials, and the markup goes away
Platform markup exists because the call runs on our account. Supply your own credentials for a service and the provider bills you directly — there is no platform cost to mark up.
That is the trade: shared provisioning is convenient and metered; bring-your-own is cheaper at volume and gives you a direct relationship with the provider. See How integrations work.
Subscriptions
If your organization has an active subscription covering a service, usage of it is recorded but not deducted from your balance. You still get full usage reporting; the balance is simply not drawn down.
Plans, their prices and the limits attached to each are served live:
/org-management/subscription/plansJWTZero-cost usage
Calls that cost nothing are still recorded. Nothing is deducted, but the usage appears in your reporting — so your analytics reflect what actually happened rather than only what was billable.
Running out of balance
Before a metered call runs, your balance is checked against the sales price. If there is not enough, the call is refused and you are notified.
A phone call's cost is not known until it ends; an email's cost is known once it is sent. For these, the charge is applied afterwards — and if the balance cannot cover it, the work has already occurred. It is not reversed. The shortfall is recorded and you are alerted, so keep enough balance to cover in-flight usage rather than running to zero.
Usage reporting
Usage is recorded per call with its endpoint, cost and metadata, so you can see where spend goes rather than only a total.
Reporting covers usage over a date range, historical usage by month, usage by type, and per-API-key usage — the last being how an unexpected spike gets traced back to the integration causing it.
For the platform operator: Service Usage
Everything above is one organization's view. Whoever runs the platform — signed in to the platform's own organization — sees across all of them under System Operations:
- Service Usage answers which organizations use our shared services, how much, what it costs us and what we billed them. The top line is Orgs using shared services, Billed to orgs, Our cost, Margin, Uses with no cost recorded and Orgs needing attention, over a period you pick (this month, last 30 or 90 days, last month, this year, or custom). Below it the same figures By service and By organization, searchable and sortable.
- Open an organization to see each service it used — through Our shared account or Their own account, and whether it has an agreement — its Uses, Billed, Our cost, Margin, Last used, its balance, the calls that were refused (no agreement, or not enough balance), and its Charges, one line per charge.
- Uses with no cost recorded flags a priced service that went through the shared account with nothing charged — a pricing gap to fix, not free usage. Lookups and reads the catalog does not price are counted apart; they are free by design.
- Usage & Credits has three tabs: Organizations lists every organization's balance in dollars (filter to those with credit, with none left, or using services this month); Services lists the metered services and their rates; Gift Credits adds credit to an organization.
The figures come from the usage each organization is actually charged, not from who has signed an agreement — an organization using a shared service without one still shows up, flagged.
Credit between organizations
Credit can be gifted from one organization to another, for agencies and partners funding the organizations they manage.