Documentation

Plans & billing

Squid Support bills on one of two rails, decided by how you signed up. Which rail you are on determines where you approve charges, where invoices appear, and where you change or cancel a plan.

Current prices, included volumes and overage rates live on the pricing page. They are deliberately not repeated here, so this guide cannot drift out of date.

The two billing rails

An account uses one rail or the other and cannot mix them. This is enforced in the product, not just by convention: a Shopify-billed account cannot reach card checkout at all, and a card-billed account cannot be charged through Shopify. If you somehow land on the wrong payment screen, it will refuse the request rather than take a second payment method.

There is one deliberate exception at sign-up. If you already have a Squid Support account and then install the Shopify app, you can connect the store to your existing account and carry on being billed the way you already were — installing does not silently move you onto Shopify billing.

Trials

A new account gets one free trial. Two things are worth knowing:

• The trial is granted on your first subscription only. Changing plan later, or cancelling and resubscribing, does not start a new one — otherwise it would be possible to stay on trial indefinitely by hopping between tiers.
• During the trial the product is not restricted to a preview. You are running the real thing on real conversations, which is the point: the trial is only useful if it tells you what the paid experience is like.

When the trial ends without a plan, the account moves to a limited state rather than deleting anything. Your conversation history stays intact.

What counts towards your plan

Two things are metered:

• Tickets — conversations handled in the billing period.
• AI messages — messages the AI generates. A message the AI drafts and you then send still counts; the work was done either way.

Internal notes between colleagues are not customer messages and are not metered as AI usage. Current usage against your included volume is shown in billing settings.

Going over your included volume

Exceeding the included tickets or AI messages does not stop the service or start dropping customer messages — support outages are worse than overage charges. Usage beyond the included volume is billed at the per-unit rates on the pricing page.

On the Shopify rail those charges are metered usage against your subscription, and Shopify requires an explicit cap that you approve up front. We can never charge past that cap without asking you to approve a new one, so the worst case for a surprise month is bounded and visible before you agree to it.

Usage is posted regularly through the period rather than in one lump at the end, so the figure you see is close to live rather than a month-end shock.

Changing plan

Upgrades take effect once approved. On the Shopify rail a plan change sends you to a Shopify confirmation screen — the change is not active until you approve it there, so if a change appears not to have applied, that unapproved screen is the first thing to check.

Cancelling

Cancel on the rail that bills you: in Shopify admin for Shopify-billed accounts, in dashboard billing settings for card-billed accounts.

Uninstalling the Shopify app cancels the subscription automatically. You do not need to cancel separately, and you will not keep being charged for an app you removed. What uninstalling does to your data is covered in Security & privacy.

Invoices and questions

Shopify-billed charges appear on your regular Shopify invoice, so they are reconciled alongside your other app spend. Card-billed invoices are available in dashboard billing settings.

For anything that looks wrong, email hello@squidsupport.ai with your store domain and the billing period in question. Terms are in the Terms of Service.