Phone Credits

What are phone credits?

Phone credits are the number of phone call or text message alerts that can be sent in response to monitoring events. Credits are not used like monitor credits; rather, each call made or text message sent simply consumes one phone credit.

All premium plans provide a certain number of monthly phone credits, which are reset each month. Unused credits do not roll over to the next month. For the purposes of phone credits, "month" refers to a calendar month, and is not reflective of your billing cycle.

For example, if you sign up to the Pro plan on the 15th of January, you can use up to 50 phone call or text message alerts in January. Regardless of how many you actually used, on the 1st of February the amount available is reset to 50.

What if I run out of credits?

If your account has no phone credits remaining, no phone call or text message alerts will be sent. The exact implications of this depend on how you have configured your alerts, but typically means that the user being alerted is contacted another way - for example, by email.

When your account uses 75% of its monthly credits, we will email administrators. At the 90% and 100% limits, we will send another email and a text message to each administrator (if they have a phone number associated with their account). These text messages are free of charge, and both these and the emails can be disabled on your profile (although we do not recommend this).

If you want to keep receiving phone call or text message alerts, you can upgrade your account or buy extra credits.

Why don't other alert types have a credit limit?

The simple answer is that telephony is expensive, at least in comparison to networking. All alerts cost us some amount to process, but for all other types this is orders of magnitude less than a phone call or text message.

Our plans offer a generous amount of phone credits and the majority of users never hit the monthly cap.

However, some accounts can send thousands of phone calls a month. If we did not impose a phone credit limit, we would need to increase the price of our services to account for this.

Is there any way around this limit?

While you could simply avoid using phone call or text message alerts, this negates a key feature of StatusCloud monitoring.

Instead, you could use a third-party alerting service, such as PagerDuty, and use a webhook alert to trigger the calls that way. This may be useful if you have an existing subscription with one of these services, but you should consider if simply buying extra credits would be a cheaper solution.

Enterprise users can also provide us with an API key for a programmatic telephony service, such as Vonage or Twilio. Phone alerts sent this way do not consume any credits, but will likely incur a charge from the telephony provider. For more information, contact your StatusCloud representative.

Can I buy extra credits?

Yes.

Extra phone credits can be purchased from your account's billing page. They are available in packs of 100, for $10 per pack. Any extra credits you purchase never expire, and are only consumed if you run out of monthly credits.

Enterprise users cannot purchase credits this way and should instead contact their StatusCloud representative.