Billing and subscriptions
Everything you pay for as an SDK developer, and what happens to your end users when a payment does not go through.
| Audience | SDK developers, platform admins, finance stakeholders |
|---|---|
| Prerequisites | A Developer Portal account |
What you can pay for
Three separate things, billed separately, and none of them requires the others:
| What | Cost | Billed |
|---|---|---|
| Embed plan — SDK Free or SDK Pro | $0 or $499/mo | Monthly subscription |
| Analytics — Core, Core + Action, Core + Action + Predictive | $350 / $450 / $550 per month | Monthly subscription, per MCP server |
| Usage beyond your plan — optional | $0.10 per request, $25/mo per extra server | Metered, capped by your budget |
New developers get a 30-day trial with Core, Action, and Predictive included. You do not need to enter a card to start it.
Your embed plan sets how many MCP servers each end user may create and how many MCP requests your whole integration may serve in a month. Those numbers, and the important detail that they are counted on two different axes, are in SDK plan limits.
Your analytics subscription is bought once at the integration level and granted to every end user who deploys a server through your embed. They do not buy an MCP Studio analytics subscription separately. Telemetry is captured on every request regardless of tier, so turning a tier on backfills the dashboard with history you already have.
Paying past your plan limits
By default your plan's limits are hard stops. Turn on usage beyond your plan in the Developer Portal and set a monthly budget to keep serving end users past them instead.
The budget is required, not optional, and it is the most the overage can add to your bill that month. Requests and extra servers draw on the same figure. Once the month's overage reaches it, we stop serving overage and your end users are refused exactly as they were before.
Two behaviours worth knowing:
- Your end users never see anything about your budget or your bill. They get the same message as on a plan limit: that it is your app's allowance, not their own account.
- Extra servers are priced once a day, not the moment one is created. A server created and deleted the same day is not billed, and the monthly charge falls again when your end users delete servers.
Turning it off cancels that billing straight away rather than at the end of the period. Usage already served is still invoiced.
Overage is available on both plans. If you are on Free and need more requests but do not want to commit to Pro, you can buy the requests instead.
When a payment fails
Your access is not cut off at the first failed charge. Stripe retries a declined card for several days, and an expired card should not take your customers' MCP servers offline while you update it.
| Day | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1–11 | Stripe retries the payment and emails you. Access continues. |
| 12 | We email you a warning with the date access will be removed. |
| 14 | The subscription is cancelled and the plan drops to Free. |
A downgrade removes paid capability. It does not delete your configurations, your end users' MCP servers, their sources, or your analytics history. If you pay after a downgrade, the grant is reinstated automatically.
If the failed payment is for usage beyond your plan, the same 14-day window applies and then overage is switched off, which puts your limits back to hard stops rather than leaving usage unpaid.
If you need more time, email zair@appatools.com.
Updating a card, invoices, and cancelling
All of it happens in Stripe's billing portal, reachable from the pricing page in the Developer Portal.
Subscribing a second time creates a second subscription and charges you twice. A payment link can only ever create a subscription — it cannot repair an existing one. Use the billing portal to update the card on the subscription you already have.
Cancelling in the portal ends the subscription at the end of the paid period. Your end users keep the tier you granted them until then.
Deleting your developer account
Requesting deletion cancels every live subscription immediately and schedules the account for removal 24 hours later. The account is not deleted until billing has actually stopped, so there is no need — and no way — to cancel first.
Deletion also revokes the entitlements mirrored into MCP Studio, so end users of your embed stop receiving the analytics tier you were granting them.
Related
- SDK plan limits — the two ceilings and how each is counted
- Analytics and observability — what each tier shows