Changing your audio volume mid-subscription: what happens to your credits and your invoice
Scaling up on the 20th, scaling down for the summer, switching to annual billing: what takes effect immediately, what waits for renewal, and how proration works for both price and credits. The rules as the code applies them, with a worked example.
Nobody picks an audio subscription on a busy day. You choose it on a quiet afternoon, from an estimate. You change it on a different kind of day: a news story that doubles output, a special report, a second site added to the account, or a section that closes. On that day there is only one question worth asking: "if I change now, what do I pay, and what do I lose?"
This is how WeDispatch answers it, described from what the billing code actually does, with numbers. The whole policy fits in one sentence: going up takes effect immediately and is prorated; going down waits for renewal. Everything else follows from that.
What "volume" means here
Your volume is the number of credits your account gets each month. One credit covers a thousand characters read aloud, whether for a new audio or a correction. The slider runs from 1 to 1,250 credits a month; above that, pricing is negotiated. Volume is a ceiling, not a billing threshold: once it is reached, production pauses until the next period, and nothing is billed as overage. That is what makes the invoice predictable, and it is also why being able to scale up mid-month matters. If you are unsure how many credits a typical article uses, the estimate is broken down in how many credits one audio takes.
Scaling up: immediate, and your billing date stays put
Say you hit your ceiling on the 20th with ten days of publishing still ahead. The increase applies at once, on monthly and annual plans alike, and your billing period does not restart. Your next renewal date is the same as before.
You pay the price difference between the old and new volume, prorated over the time left until that renewal. Not a fresh full period, just the unexpired share.
Credits follow the very same proration. This is the part most pricing pages leave vague, so here it is with numbers.
A worked example
A monthly account at 100 credits, on a 30-day period. On day 10 it moves to 300 credits. Two thirds of the period remain.
- Price: it pays two thirds of the difference between the 300-credit and 100-credit prices.
- Credits for the current period: 100 + (300 − 100) × 2/3, which is 233 credits (rounded down to the whole credit).
- From the next period: the full 300 credits, at the full price.
Credits already used stay used. If the account had spent 90 credits before the change, it has 143 left until renewal. The billing screen states this before you confirm, with the date: "until [date] you will have this many credits, then 300 each month."
Why not hand over all 300 credits on the spot? Because the rule would then be trivial to game: scale up the day before renewal, pay one thirtieth of the difference, burn hundreds of credits, scale back down. Price and credits come from the same formula at the same instant, so you cannot get one without the other.
If payment fails, nothing changes
An increase is held pending until the difference invoice is paid. A declined card or an abandoned bank authentication leaves the account at its current volume, with no phantom credits. Before this rule, a new volume could apply while payment retries were still running. That path is closed.
You review the amount on an invoice page hosted by our payment provider, which the screen links you to. It shows the calculation and the payment method, on a page that is authoritative, rather than a box on our own site you would have to take on trust.
Scaling down: at renewal, no refund
A decrease is scheduled for renewal. You keep your current volume until then and nothing is refunded for the current period. That is the counterpart of instant upgrades, and it is stated on the subscription page before anyone signs up.
The request is never refused, only dated. "You can't go down" becomes "this happens on 14 March", which is the same rule said the helpful way round. A later request replaces an earlier one if you change your mind.
Switching to annual, or back
Moving from monthly to annual is not a volume change, it is a purchase: it takes effect immediately and starts twelve months from that day. The unused part of the current month is credited on the invoice. This is the only case where the period restarts.
Going back to monthly waits until the end of the year already paid for. Scaling up does not double as an exit: "increase and switch back to monthly" is still scheduled for the end of the year.
One limit worth knowing: below five credits a month, the subscription is annual only. Card processing fees on a tiny monthly charge would eat a disproportionate share of it, so dropping to two credits while staying monthly is not offered.
Two situations people worry about
Goodwill credits. Credits granted as a commercial gesture do not expire at the end of the month, and they are only drawn once the month's allocation is used up. Since October, each grant is pinned to the account's volume on the day it was given, so a later decrease does not shrink it and an increase does not inflate it.
Paying twice. A double click or two open tabs can create two subscriptions minutes apart. When they are less than 48 hours apart, the older one is cancelled, what it paid for the current period is refunded automatically, and an email says so. A plan change made weeks later is not a duplicate: the old subscription is closed without a refund, because it was used.
What these rules do not do
They do not smooth out irregular output for you: an exceptional month is handled with a temporary increase followed by a scheduled decrease. They do not refund a decrease mid-period. And they are separate from the spending safeguards that stop a feed or an automation from draining your volume behind your back, which are covered in audio budget safeguards.
If you are still comparing tools, ask each one the same two questions before signing: what happens if I scale up on the 20th, and what happens if I scale down? The checklist we apply to ourselves when people ask how to choose a French text-to-speech tool treats this as a criterion alongside reading quality. Volume pricing is on the pricing page.
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