Documentation

Increasing and decreasing your plan.

You raise and lower every item on your plan on the portal's Change plan page: key slots, operation blocks, served regions, placed keys and failover protection. An increase and a decrease follow different rules, and a decrease can be refused. This page explains both rules, every reason for a refusal, and what to change so the decrease goes through.

The billing cycle

Billing runs on the calendar month. Every plan renews on the 1st of the month, in UTC. Your first invoice is prorated for the partial month you signed up in, so you pay only for the days you had. The monthly operation allowance counts the same calendar month.

Increasing

An increase applies at once. Before you confirm, the page shows the prorated amount Stripe will charge today, or an estimate it marks as estimated, and the date the capacity starts. It charges the payment method already on your subscription, and the new capacity follows the payment. A new served region is billed from the payment and starts serving within about an hour; until then the page and your console show it as provisioning. If your bank asks for confirmation, the page links the invoice where you complete it; if the payment is declined, nothing changes.

Each key slot beyond the one your base subscription includes is $10 a month and includes no operations. Operations come in blocks of 100,000 at $5 a month. There is no cap on key slots. The page adds at most 25 key slots in any rolling seven days; for a larger increase, email support@sanctikey.com, and once SanctiKey approves the request the limit is lifted for that increase.

Decreasing

Your plan has two kinds of item, and a decrease follows a different rule for each. The page states which rule applies, with the amount or the date, before you confirm.

Key slots, operation blocks and placed keys are capacity inside your environment. Lowering one takes effect as soon as your environment confirms it, and the unused part of the current billing period is credited, prorated, on your next invoice. Before you confirm, the page shows the credit Stripe calculates for that change. If that calculation is unavailable, the page shows an estimate and says it is estimated.

Served regions and failover protection are infrastructure we run for you. Removing one is scheduled for the 1st of next month. The region keeps serving, or the protection keeps running, until then, and the bill and the capacity end together on the 1st. There is no refund for the rest of the current period, and the page shows the end date before you confirm. On that 1st, any keys placed in a removed region are deleted from it, and its placed key slots leave your bill with it. Each key stays in your home region, which never changes.

A decrease is checked before it reaches your bill. The portal first compares it against your environment's last usage report and refuses it on the spot when that report already shows the item in use. For key slots, operation blocks and placed keys, your environment then confirms the lower count against what it holds right now, and only a confirmed decrease reaches your bill. You receive an email with the outcome either way.

Confirming and cancelling

After you lower key slots, operation blocks or placed keys, the Change plan page shows that your environment is confirming the lower count. Confirmation usually arrives within a few seconds, and the page waits for about thirty. Once confirmed, your subscription shows the lower count within minutes and the credit appears on your next invoice. If your environment refuses the decrease, the page shows what is in use and what to change. If no answer arrives while the page waits, it says so, and the email follows.

Until your environment confirms it, the page offers to cancel the decrease. A confirmed decrease is final. To get the capacity back, raise your plan again, which is charged like any other increase.

After you remove a served region or failover protection, the page shows the removal as scheduled, with its end date, and a button to withdraw it. Withdrawing any time before the 1st costs nothing: the region keeps serving, the protection keeps running, and nothing is torn down.

Each item on your plan carries one open change at a time. A second change to the same item waits until the open one is confirmed, withdrawn or applied, so a scheduled region removal holds further changes to served regions until you withdraw it or the 1st passes. Changes to other items go ahead: you can add key slots or operation blocks while a removal waits for the 1st. Change one item per request.

Why a decrease is refused

An item leaves your bill only after it has left use. A plan that billed for less than your environment runs would leave capacity live and unpaid, and removing a region that a failover pair points at would break that failover in the outage it exists for. So a decrease below what is in use is refused, nothing is charged, and the refusal names what is in use, the rule behind it, and what to change.

Your home region comes with the base plan. A served-region line that names your home region is never held by the keys there, so it can always be removed.

Making the decrease succeed

Clear the item in your console first, then lower it in the portal. The refusal shows the usage report it was checked against and when that report was taken. A change you make in the console reaches the portal with your environment's next usage report, usually within seconds and always within the hour. Deleting a key starts its thirty day pending window, and the slot frees when that window closes, so lower the key count after the deletion completes. The Limits page covers what each item costs.