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A billing account is what pays for your orgs: one account can cover many, and you can create or belong to more than one account. The orgs on an account share a single invoice, itemized per org, so a company that separates staging from production sees what each one costs side by side. The people on an account are billing users, and being one is separate from belonging to any org.

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How It Fits

Billing users manage the account, and the account pays for the orgs. A billing user, finance@example.com, holds billing_admin, billing_viewer, or org_creator. An arrow labeled manage points to the billing account, my-account, which holds the payment method, invoices, spend alert, and audit trail. Arrows labeled pays for fan out from the account to two orgs, staging and production. Each org bills to exactly one account, up to the account's org quota. You add billing users by email. Access inside an org comes from policies, not billing roles. A billing user holds one or more of three roles.

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Key Behaviors

  • Setup runs in a fixed order. A new account accepts the Terms of Use, adds a payment method, and only then offers to create its first org. The Console walks the three steps in that sequence.
  • A monthly spend alert emails every billing_admin. Enable the alert and set an amount in USD; the first time the account’s spend for a month reaches that amount, Control Plane sends the email once, and the alert resets when the next month starts.
  • Cost & Usage aggregates every org on the account. Break the total down per org and per resource, and read a projected total for the current period, extrapolated from the spend so far.
  • The account keeps its own audit trail. Changes to account details, payment methods, and billing users are recorded separately from the org audit trail.
  • Pricing is usage-based with no contracts or minimums. Current rates are on controlplane.com/pricing; the platform features documented on this site carry no separate charge.

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Gotchas

  • A billing role is not an org permission. A billing_admin sees which orgs the account pays for, and nothing inside them.
  • Billing users and org members are two different lists. Adding someone to the account does not add them to an org, and an org invite does not add them to the account, so a teammate who needs both is added twice.
  • Creating an org is gated on the account, not the org. It takes billing_admin or org_creator on the account that will pay; the Console refuses with You must have one of ["billing_admin", "org_creator"] roles in this account to be able to create an org with this account.
  • An account starts with a small org quota. Creating an org past it fails with account X already has met its quota of N orgs. To increase this quota, please contact support.
  • The paying account is set at org creation, and orgs are permanent. The create request names the account, and an org cannot be deleted afterwards. A billing_admin on both the source and destination accounts can move an org between them through the API.

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Learn More

Org (Organization)

What an org holds and why teams run several.

Access Control

How permission inside an org is granted, and why billing roles are not it.

Compliance

Attestations, the shared responsibility matrix, and how to request a report.

Quotas

Per-resource limits inside an org, and how to request an increase.