- What: Pay as you go lets Developer and Startup customers buy exactly the extra capacity they need on top of their plan, one unit at a time. +1 inbox, +1 custom domain, or +1,000 monthly sends, each $2/mo. We also turned on annual billing for both plans at 20% off.
- Why it matters: The single most consistent piece of feedback in our support inbox has been that the jump from Developer ($20/mo) to Startup ($200/mo) is too steep. Pay as you go kills the cliff. You buy the capacity you actually need, when you need it.
- How it works: Console → Billing → drag a slider → pay the prorated amount. Your limit goes up instantly. Lowering an add-on takes effect at the end of the billing period. Fully self-serve.
The single biggest complaint in our support inbox
The gap between Developer and Startup has easily been our most requested fix for months. We heard it constantly. From indie builders. From production teams. From people who'd been happily paying $20/mo and just wanted to keep going without a 10x jump to $200. It's the kind of thing that quietly caps a product's growth, because the answer to "can I have one more inbox" shouldn't be "sure, that's another $180 a month."
Finally shipping the fix.
The problem: the plans were all-or-nothing
AgentMail plans have always been shaped around three limits: inboxes, custom domains, and monthly sends.
- Free: 3 inboxes, 0 domains
- Developer ($20/mo): 10 inboxes, 10 domains, 10,000 sends
- Startup ($200/mo): 150 inboxes, 150 domains, 150,000 sends
If you were on Developer and needed an 11th inbox, your only option was Startup. Ten times the price for a single extra inbox you didn't ask for. Same story if you needed a couple of extra custom domains or another thousand sends. You either got stuck between the tiers or paid for capacity you'd never use.
What we shipped: Pay as you go
Any Developer or Startup customer can now add capacity on top of their plan, one unit at a time:
- +1 inbox: $2/mo
- +1 custom domain: $2/mo
- +1,000 monthly sends: $2/mo
Buy as many of each as you need. If you're on Developer and want 15 inboxes and one extra domain, that's $20 + $10 + $2 = $32/mo. If you're on Startup and pushing 175,000 sends, that's $200 + $50 = $250/mo. No jumping tiers, no phantom capacity.
We also turned on annual billing for both plans:
- Developer annual: $192/yr (20% off)
- Startup annual: $1,920/yr (20% off)
Pay-as-you-go units on annual plans get the same 20% discount.
How to turn it on
Fully self-serve. Nothing to email us about.
- Head to Console → Billing / Upgrade.
- Drag the slider for whichever resource you're adding: Inboxes, Domains, or Sends.
- Review the exact prorated amount for the rest of this billing period.
- Click Pay.
Your new limit is live instantly. If you later want to lower a pay-as-you-go unit, the reduction takes effect at the end of the billing period, and you can cancel a pending downgrade anytime before it lands.
Under the hood
The way it actually works, if you care:
- Your Stripe subscription now holds one plan item plus one line per pay-as-you-go add-on. Quantity on each line is how many units you've bought.
- Whenever Stripe tells us the subscription changed, the AgentMail API recomputes your org's limits: plan limits + pay-as-you-go quantities, then writes those back to the org record.
- The API enforces those limits at the point they matter:
create_inbox,create_domain, andsend. - Increases are prorated and charged immediately, so your new capacity is real the moment you buy it. Decreases are scheduled for the next renewal, so nobody games the limit mid-month by scaling up, hammering their quota, then scaling back down.
Simple in shape, but the Stripe reconciliation loop and the enforcement path are what make it feel instant instead of eventually-consistent.
Who this is for
- You're on Developer and you've grown past 10 of anything.
- You're on Startup and you're bumping into a ceiling but nowhere near ready to talk to us about Enterprise.
- You're on Free, you want a custom domain, and you don't want to pay $200/mo to get one. Upgrade to Developer at $20/mo, add a domain for $2, done.
- You want the 20% annual discount and have never had a way to take it before.
If you're at Enterprise scale, book a call. Everything below that is now yours to configure directly.
What this unlocks
The gap between Developer and Startup was the single biggest reason people either churned or stayed on capacity they'd outgrown. That gap is closed.
You now pay for the exact shape of AgentMail you actually use. No forced upgrades. No wasted capacity. No support ticket to change your plan.
Go build.
Pay as you go is live for all Developer and Startup customers in the console today.
