Billing

Overview

Groundtruth uses Stripe to manage payments and invoices. All billing actions are restricted to the owner role (see Team Management).

During the beta soft launch, all users are on the Explorer (free) plan with all features included. Revenue comes from credit pack purchases. Subscription tiers (Operator/Studio/Enterprise) are built but paused until market validation.

Current Model: Explorer + Credit Packs

Every account starts as Explorer — free, with a 200-credit signup bonus. To run engagements, purchase credit packs:

Credits never expire. Purchased credits carry over indefinitely.

How Credits Work

• Each engagement run is charged based on LLM token cost with a 7x multiplier (e.g., $1.00 AI cost = 7 credits consumed).
• A €2.00 minimum charge applies per run.
• Charges are deducted from your credit balance when a run completes.
• If your balance reaches zero, you cannot start new runs until you purchase more credits.

Buying Credits

1. Click the Get Credits button on the dashboard or in the billing section of Settings.
2. Choose a pack: Spark (500), Boost (2,000), or Vault (6,000).
3. Complete payment via the Stripe checkout modal.
4. Credits are added to your balance immediately after payment.

Credit Balance Display

The billing section on the Settings page shows your current credit balance. A usage bar indicates consumption:

• Green -- Plenty of credits remaining.
• Yellow -- Running low (below 500 credits).
• Amber -- Zero credits — runs are blocked until you buy more.

Recent charges (last 5 entries) are listed with amounts and dates.

Managing Billing

If you have made a purchase, click Manage Billing in the billing section of Settings. This opens the Stripe Customer Portal, where you can:

• Update your payment method (credit card).
• View and download past invoices/receipts.

All billing management happens through Stripe's hosted portal. Groundtruth does not store your payment card details.

Subscriptions (Coming Soon)

Subscription tiers will be available when the platform exits beta:

Until then, all features are available on the Explorer plan during beta.

BYOK LLM Keys

Studio and Enterprise plan subscribers (when reactivated) can bring their own LLM API keys (BYOK) so that engagement runs use their own API accounts instead of the platform's shared keys. This is configured in Settings > LLM API Keys.

Supported Providers

Adding a Key

1. Navigate to Settings > LLM API Keys.
2. Click Add Key on the provider card.
3. Paste your API key into the input field.
4. The platform validates the key against the provider's API (10-second timeout).
5. If valid, the key is encrypted (Fernet AES-128-CBC + HMAC-SHA256) and stored. Only the first 8 characters are displayed for identification.

Managing Keys

• Re-validate -- Checks that a stored key is still valid with the provider.
• Remove -- Deletes the encrypted key. Runs will fall back to platform keys.

How BYOK Works

When an engagement runs, the engine checks for BYOK keys first. If you have a key stored for a given provider, that key is used instead of the platform's environment variable. If no BYOK key exists for a provider, the platform's own key is used as a fallback. This means you can selectively override only some providers.

Only owner and admin roles can manage BYOK keys.

Usage Tracking

The platform tracks your usage:

• Credit balance -- visible on the dashboard hero and in Settings > Billing.
• Engagement count -- the number of active engagements is shown alongside your plan's limit (e.g., "3 of 10 engagements this month").
• Total spend -- cumulative LLM cost across all engagement runs is tracked and visible on the dashboard.
• Storage usage -- file upload storage consumption is tracked (see File Uploads).

Key Details

• Only the owner role can manage billing. Other roles cannot access billing settings.
• Stripe processes all payments. Groundtruth does not handle or store credit card information.
• BYOK keys are encrypted at rest and never displayed in full after saving.
• Platform admin plan overrides (used for beta testers or family accounts) bypass Stripe entirely.

Related Guides

• Team Management -- understanding roles and who can manage billing
• File Uploads -- storage limits by plan
• Engagements -- engagement limits by plan