Prepaid Credits for Organizations

Organization admins can pre-purchase compute credits in bulk and apply them to the shared organization balance. Member usage is drawn from the org balance before ever falling through to a member’s credit card.

Volume discounts up to 20% off are applied automatically based on purchase size.

Prepaid credits are real money, kept separate from free credits

Your org balance is made of two distinct buckets:

• Trial/promo credits — free credits we mint into the org (sign-up promos, grants). Nobody paid for them.
• Prepaid credits — the real money you buy on this page.

These are tracked separately on purpose. Prepaid credits are a paid-for, purchased balance; free trial/promo credits are not. Because of that, free credits are always spent first — your purchased prepaid balance is preserved and is never drawn down while any free org credit remains. Buying credits tops up the prepaid bucket specifically; it never gets commingled with, or burned ahead of, your free credits.

Admins see the trial/prepaid breakdown on the My Organization page; members see the combined available balance.

Keeping prepaid in its own bucket is also what lets it earn interest — your purchased balance accrues a SOFR-referenced, daily-compounded yield while it sits idle. See Interest on Prepaid Credits.

Who can buy

Only organization admins can purchase credits on behalf of the organization. Regular members can see the org’s remaining balance from the My Organization page but cannot top it up.

How credits are spent

When an org member’s compute or storage is billed, Carolina Cloud walks the following chain — free money first:

1. The organization’s trial/promo credits (free, minted credits — if the member belongs to an org).
2. The organization’s prepaid credits (the real money bought on this page — spent once free org credits run out).
3. The organization’s payment method (if one is on file — see Organization Payment Method).
4. The member’s personal trial credits.
5. The member’s personal Stripe card on file.

Org-side funds (both credit buckets, then card) are exhausted before any member-side funds are touched, and free org credits are always burned before purchased prepaid credits. A member’s personal trial credits are preserved while the organization is paying. Members without a personal card on file simply stop running once both org-side and personal-side funds are exhausted — they are never surprise-charged.

Org-owned storage (a bucket the org owns directly, not a member’s bucket) has no member to fall back to, so it draws only from org credits (trial then prepaid) and the org card. See How org-attributed usage is paid for the full picture.

Admins can also set a per-member cap on how much of the org pool any individual member is allowed to draw — see Per-member spend cap.

Volume discount

Larger purchases receive a larger discount, up to a cap of 20%. The discount rises continuously with amount and hits the 20% cap at $4,000:

You pay	You receive	Effective discount
$10	$10.00	~0%
$100	$100.40	0.4%
$500	$510.42	2.0%
$1,000	$1,043.56	4.2%
$2,000	$2,192.24	8.8%
$4,000	$5,000.00	20%
$5,000	$6,250.00	20%

Any purchase of $4,000 or more is discounted by the full 20%.

Purchasing credits

1. Go to Usage & Billing → My Organization in the dashboard.
2. Scroll to Org billing → Pre-paid credits.
3. Enter the USD amount you want to spend. The dashboard shows the exact credit total and discount percentage in real time.
4. Click Purchase. A Stripe Checkout tab opens.
5. Complete payment. Credits are added to the organization balance as soon as Stripe confirms payment — usually within a few seconds of returning to the dashboard.

Minimum purchase is $1. Credits do not expire, and there is no subscription or minimum commitment.

Refunds

Prepaid credits are non-refundable once purchased. If something has gone wrong, email hello@carolinacloud.io and we’ll make it right.