> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.helohq.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Understand how billing works

> Get answers to all your questions around how billing works at Helo.

Helo has usage-based pricing. This means you pay for the emails you send, plus a small monthly platform fee (\$5) for your account. That’s it.

There are no plan tiers to choose between, monthly (or annual) volume commitments, or overage fees.

## What is a platform fee?

The \$5 platform fee is the cost of having an active Helo account (the things that exist whether you send one email or a million). That includes the good stuff, like friendly, human support when you need it, and the boring stuff, like payment processing fees and base infrastructure costs.

This helps us keep the per-email rate ridiculously low without losing money (as a bootstrapped business, profitability is important). That means at most sending volumes you’re paying less than you would at our competitors.

## Do you offer a free plan?

We know that everyone loves free stuff. We do, too! But do you know who really likes free email sending? Spammers. Urgh.

The sad truth is that the internet is a weird place and bad actors will find a way to try and abuse email sending tools, especially if free sending is available. We’d rather spend our time supporting legit senders like you than playing whack-a-mole with spammers.

That’s why we offer the following:

*1,000 free messages for testing*
You can send up to 1,000 messages for free, as long as you’re sending those to recipients on your own domain (that you’ve already verified in Helo)—that’s plenty of free test messages to explore Helo’s sending features.

*Affordable entry pricing*
When you’re ready to send outside your domain, you’ll find Helo’s pricing is designed to be fair and affordable at every volume. Sending 3,500 emails costs just \$6.23, or about \$1 less than Rob’s typical Starbucks order.

A lot of email platforms quietly subsidize their biggest customers off the margins of their smallest ones. We think that’s pretty crappy. And as a bootstrapped company, we know what it's like to watch every dollar.

## How does billing work? I need help understanding my invoice.

When you start your paid Helo subscription, we’ll charge you the \$5 platform fee so you can get access to all of Helo’s features. From here, we’ll keep track of your sending volume. When your plan renews a month later, we’ll charge you for the emails you sent in the past month, plus the Helo platform fee for the upcoming billing period.