Add top-up credits
A top-up is a one-off purchase of credits, separate from your subscription. It is the right instrument when the periodic allowance runs out before the period does.
How a top-up differs from the subscription allowance
| Subscription credits | Top-up credits | |
|---|---|---|
| Granted | On activation and each renewal | When you buy them |
| Replaced at renewal | Yes — unused credits are lost | No |
| Typical lifetime | The billing period | Two years from purchase |
| Spent | First | Only after subscription credits are gone |
The two rows that matter: a top-up survives renewals, and it is spent last. Together they make it a reserve rather than a parallel wallet.
When a top-up is the right answer
- The month's allowance is exhausted and the work cannot wait.
- A one-off project — a site migration, a catalogue translation, a bulk metadata pass — is much larger than normal usage.
- Your workload is uneven and a plan sized for the peak would waste credits in every quiet period.
When it is not
If you buy a top-up most periods, the subscription is simply too small. A larger plan costs less than repeatedly patching the same shortfall. See Single, Agency and Unlimited.
Buying one
Top-ups are purchased on account.pom.es like any other order. Once the order completes, the credits appear as a new batch in My Account → POM AI Management, under Top-up credit batches, labelled with its order and showing the date it was added, the amount remaining and its expiry.
The balance in WordPress will not change until it is refreshed. Use Refresh on the POM AI dashboard panel, or reload the License tab. See Check your credit balance.
Two-year lifetime
A top-up batch expires two years after it is created. That is long enough that it functions as a genuine reserve, and short enough that it is not indefinite.
Two years is the batch's own life. It is unaffected by subscription renewals, plan changes and cancellations. If the subscription lapses entirely, whatever remains in the top-up batch is still usable until its own date — although an inactive license will stop the site from making requests at all, which is a separate problem.
Watching a top-up
Because top-ups are spent last, a top-up balance that does not move is normal. It means the subscription allowance is covering the workload, which is what you want.
Two things are worth checking occasionally:
- The expiry date, so a reserve does not quietly lapse unused.
- Whether it has started moving, because that is the signal that the subscription allowance ran out — often the first visible sign that the plan is too small.
Several top-ups
Nothing stops you holding more than one top-up batch. They are spent oldest-expiring first within the top-up group, so a batch bought earlier is used before a later one.
Refunds and reversals
If an operation is reversed after credits were consumed, they return to the batches they came from with their original expiry dates. A reversal does not create a new two-year batch.
Planning with a reserve
For teams with firm deadlines, the practical arrangement is:
- Size the subscription for the normal month.
- Hold a top-up big enough to absorb one bad week.
- Check the usage log monthly, so you notice the reserve being touched.
- Re-evaluate the plan if the reserve is used in consecutive periods.
See How batches are consumed for exactly when the reserve is drawn on, and Credit expiration for how the two lifetimes interact.