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Billing

Usage and seats

What you own, what is in use, and what is sitting spare.

What this is

Usage is the honest count of what you are consuming against what you are paying for.

It is the page to check before you buy more seats, and the page to check when the bill looks bigger than you expected.

How it works

Three numbers describe your seats.

  • Owned — how many you are paying for.
  • In use — how many are assigned to a mailbox right now.
  • Spare — owned minus in use. Seats you are paying for that nobody is using.

Spare seats are not waste if you are about to hire; they are waste if they have been spare for months.

Sending is counted here too. Volume matters for two reasons: what you pay, and whether your sending pattern looks healthy — a sudden jump is worth understanding before your recipients' spam filters form their own opinion. Deliverability is where that side lives.

Set it up

Nothing to configure. This is how to read it.

  1. Go to Usage.
  2. Compare owned against in use. If spare is more than one or two, you are paying for capacity nobody has.
  3. Before buying seats, check here first — a spare seat costs nothing extra to assign.
  4. Watch sending volume against what you expected to send. An unexplained jump usually means an application looping, and finding that here is cheaper than finding it on your next bill.
  5. Check this page before a big campaign so you know your starting point.

When something is wrong

In use is higher than you expected. Every paid mailbox holds a seat, including ones for people who have left. Suspending a mailbox is not the same as releasing its seat — check Creating mailboxes and free the ones you no longer need.

Owned is higher than you expected. You bought more than you assigned. Nothing is broken; you have spares.

Sending volume looks wrong. Cross-check against Reports for the same period. If the numbers still disagree with what you believe you sent, an application is sending more than you think.

You want to reduce seats. Free the mailboxes first, then adjust. Open a ticket if the change should apply to the current period.