User guide
Billing, plans and usage
Choose a plan, start a trial, understand what is metered, and know what happens if a subscription lapses.
Your plan decides how much of Brandora your workspace can use, and your subscription state decides whether premium changes are open or paused. This page covers picking a plan, what a trial gives you, exactly what is metered, and what happens if a payment fails, including the one thing that never happens: nothing is deleted.
Choosing a plan
Brandora ships five plans: Starter, Growth, Agency, Scale and Enterprise. Current prices, in your currency, are on the pricing page and on /billing inside the app. Prices are deliberately not written into this documentation: the published catalog is editable by staff, and a number typed here would go stale the moment someone repriced.
Monthly and annual billing are both offered on the self-serve plans, and the plan card shows the exact annual saving in the currency you are quoted in. Enterprise is custom: it has a published floor price but no self-serve checkout, so choosing it starts a conversation rather than a subscription. Only an OWNER or ADMIN can subscribe, change plan, pay or cancel; everyone else sees the plan and the usage, with a note saying who to ask.
Currency
Your charge currency is suggested from where the request comes from: Kenya is suggested KES, everywhere else USD. An admin can override that before subscribing.
Once a live subscription exists the currency locks. It is snapshotted onto the subscription, so neither a later override nor an admin travelling abroad can re-price something you are already paying for, and a plan change re-prices in the same currency rather than re-denominating. A workspace that has cancelled and resubscribes may choose again.
What a plan buys
Plans are bundles of entitlements. Each entitlement is a named limit, and the numbers behind them differ per plan, which is why they live in the catalog rather than in prose.
| Entitlement | Gates |
|---|---|
internal_users | Teammates in the workspace |
brands | Brands you can create |
active_campaigns | Campaigns in the ACTIVE state |
tracked_creators | Active roster entries |
monitoring_projects, query_groups | Monitoring projects and their rules |
mention_records_monthly | Monitored mentions per month |
creator_searches_monthly | Discovery searches per month |
ai_usage_monthly | AI assistant work per month |
provider_budget_monthly | Spend on paid listening sources per month |
api_access, webhooks, white_label_reports, custom_metrics, advanced_permissions | Features that are either included or not |
A limit of zero means the feature is not in your plan, and it shows as Not included rather than as a maxed-out bar. Client and guest reviewers are never counted against internal_users: external review is unlimited on every plan, because approvals fall apart the moment reviewing costs a seat.
Trials
Starter and Growth carry a 14 day trial with no card required. Agency, Scale and Enterprise do not.
A trial is a time box, not a cut-down tier: while it runs you get the full entitlements of the plan you are trialing, so you evaluate the plan you intend to buy.
Subscribing to a plan with no trial creates an incomplete subscription: the plan is chosen, but no plan entitlements are live and premium changes are paused until the payment provider confirms the first payment. Changing from a live trial onto a plan with no trial does the same, so a switch cannot extend a trial sideways. Eligibility is decided on the server from the catalog, so a hand-edited plan parameter in a signup link cannot obtain a trial on a plan that does not offer one.
Subscription states
| State | Premium changes | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| No subscription | Open, at the default floor limits | Plan cards, nothing else |
| Trialing, live | Open, at the trialed plan's limits | The trial end date and a Pay now button |
| Trialing, expired | Paused | "Your free trial has ended" |
| Incomplete | Paused | "Waiting for payment confirmation" |
| Active | Open | Your plan and its renewal date |
| Past due, inside grace | Open | "A payment did not go through", with the grace end date |
| Frozen | Paused | "Billing is frozen" |
| Canceled | Paused | "Your subscription is canceled" |
The default floor applies to a workspace that has never chosen a plan and to one whose trial has expired. It is a small working allowance, not a lockout.
What a freeze does, and what it does not
When premium changes are paused, an OWNER or ADMIN is taken to /billing once as the session opens, with a banner explaining why. Everyone else, and every later page in the same session, gets the banner without being pulled anywhere. Actions that would change your commercial state, such as cancelling or requesting a data export, are disabled while the workspace is frozen.
Note: Customer data is never deleted because a trial ran out or a payment failed. Not your campaigns, not your roster, not your mentions, not your approvals, not your reports. A lapse pauses premium changes and drops you to the floor entitlements. Everything you created is still there, and paying restores it exactly as it was.
Reading, exporting and signing in keep working. Creator Connect authorizations are unaffected: they belong to the creator, not to your subscription.
What is metered
Brandora meters customer-visible cost drivers. It does not charge per seat for reviewers, and it never meters Creator Connect connections, because a creator connecting an account is valuable to everyone and taxing it would be self-defeating.
| Cost driver | How it is counted | At the limit |
|---|---|---|
| Paid listening sources, X and YouTube | Provider units per fetch, reserved before the call | The source is skipped for that run; free sources keep collecting |
| AI assistant usage | Tokens per completed call, against the monthly allowance | Further AI calls are refused, and the feature says so |
| Brands | Counted live | Creating another is refused with an upgrade prompt |
| Tracked creators | Active roster entries, counted live | An import that would cross the limit is refused before it writes anything |
| Monitoring projects, active campaigns | Counted live and shown on /billing | Shown as approaching or over the limit; creation is not blocked today |
| Monitored mentions, discovery searches | Published as a plan allowance | Not counted against you yet |
Crossing 80 percent of an allowance shows an in-product warning. Crossing 100 percent follows that entitlement's enforcement rule, which is deliberately soft for cheap features and hard for anything that costs real provider money.
Usage reservations
Anything that spends money outside Brandora runs through a reservation: budget is reserved before the external call, settled after it succeeds, released when it fails, and expired if a worker dies holding it. Reservations are atomic, so a queue retry cannot bill you twice and no amount of retrying pushes a workspace past its provider budget.
Paying, and what proves a payment
Payment is collected in a card popup, with a hosted checkout page as the fallback if the popup cannot open. The amount is set by the server from your subscription, never read from the browser.
A successful-looking return from the payment page is not proof of payment. Brandora verifies the charge with the gateway server to server, and the gateway's webhook normalizes to the same event, so exactly one of the two applies. Your subscription moves when the gateway confirms it, and not before.
Adding a card when nothing is due places a small hold that is refunded immediately; some banks display it for a few days afterwards. Invoices are listed on /billing with their status, and an unpaid one shows why the last attempt failed.
Renewals, dunning and cancelling
Renewals are charged from the scheduled period boundary rather than the day the money arrived, so billing dates stay stable through a failed attempt. A declined card is a business outcome, not a system error: it is retried on a schedule, then the subscription goes past due with a grace window in which your team keeps working, and only when the schedule is exhausted does the workspace freeze.
Cancelling with a paid period still running takes effect at the end of that period. You keep what you paid for until then, and Resume plan undoes it any time before the date. A trial, an incomplete or a frozen subscription cancels immediately, because there is no paid period to honour.