Plans and billing
Billing lives under Billing in the rail. Owners can change what you pay. Admins can look. Drivers see none of it.
Your free trial
Section titled “Your free trial”Every new business gets 30 days on Round, free, with no card taken. The countdown sits at the top of every page so nobody has to go looking for it, and we email owners and admins a week out and again on the last day.
When the trial ends
Section titled “When the trial ends”Your round carries on. Drops, deliveries and invoices to your customers are unaffected, and a driver’s day does not change.
What waits for a plan is office work: adding customers, inviting people, and connecting other apps. Choose a plan and it all comes back, with everything still where you left it.
What each plan carries
Section titled “What each plan carries”| Vehicles | People | A month, before VAT | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 1 | up to 10 | £149 |
| Round | 3, then £79 a van, up to 10 | up to 100 | £249 |
| Depot | more than 10 | as many as you need | agreed with us |
Vehicles are what a plan is sold by, not people. Three vans might have six drivers between them and a temp on a Saturday, and charging by the head would have a yard sharing one login rather than paying twice for a van that goes out once a week. The limit on people is a ceiling rather than a price: it is set well above what a business of that size could staff, and everyone in it counts, including invitations nobody has answered yet.
Starter is one van and stays one van. A second means moving to Round, which carries three, rather than paying a surcharge on a smaller plan.
Adding a vehicle
Section titled “Adding a vehicle”On Round, the fourth van and every one after it is £79 a month. Adding one part way through a month costs the days that are left rather than a full month, and putting one on the shelf credits them back the same way. The billing page says how many you are running and what the next one costs.
Round stops at ten vans. If you are growing past that, talk to us about Depot.
Choosing a plan
Section titled “Choosing a plan”Pick Starter or Round from the billing page and you go to Stripe to pay. Cards are handled entirely by Stripe, so your card details never touch Bottle.
Moving between plans
Section titled “Moving between plans”Moving up takes you to Stripe to confirm. It shows what you owe for the days left in this month, which is the difference between the two plans rather than another full month. Agree to it and the bigger plan is yours immediately.
Moving down happens at renewal. The month you have paid for runs its course on the plan you paid for, and the smaller plan starts at the next invoice. Until then the billing page says when it changes, and you can stay where you are if you think better of it.
Cancelling works the same way: it stops the renewal rather than the month you have already paid for.
Depot is priced by conversation. If you are on it, get in touch to change anything.
Fair use
Section titled “Fair use”Your plan covers everything a business your size does in Bottle. There is a ceiling on how many actions a minute your team, your drivers and any connected apps can take between them, set well above what anybody planning a round will reach. The figures, for whoever wires up an integration:
- Starter: 300 a minute, of which 30 may be heavy operations.
- Round: 600 a minute, of which 60 may be heavy operations.
- Depot: 1,200 a minute, of which 120 may be heavy operations.
A trial has Round’s allowance. Heavy operations are the ones that cost something each time: re-optimising a round, searching, and looking up postcodes and addresses. They have their own, smaller allowance so an integration looping on a bug cannot run up a bill.
Nobody in an office, and no driver on a round, will get near these. If a
request is refused for going over, the answer is 429 with a Retry-After
header saying how many seconds to wait, and every answer carries
X-RateLimit-Limit and X-RateLimit-Remaining. Your current figures are on
the billing page, and GET /billing returns them as rateLimits.
If your business needs more, ask us. We set a higher allowance for your business and it applies within the minute.
Discounts and bespoke prices
Section titled “Discounts and bespoke prices”If we have agreed a discount with you, or a monthly price of your own in
place of the plan’s, your billing page says so: “20% off until 1 March 2027”,
“20% off, ongoing”, or “Your price: £150 a month”. Stripe applies it to every
invoice, so what you see there is what you pay. GET /billing returns them
as discount and customPrice, each null when there is none. A price of
your own does not change your plan or its allowances.
Invoices
Section titled “Invoices”Every bill appears on the billing page: the date, what it came to, and whether it has been paid. View opens the invoice itself, where the VAT breakdown and a copy for your accountant live.
If a payment fails
Section titled “If a payment fails”Nothing stops immediately. The card is tried again over the following days, and your round carries on throughout. Update the card from the billing page and the next attempt goes through.
Reading this from somewhere else
Section titled “Reading this from somewhere else”Your plan and your Bottle invoices can be read by an API key or a connected app that you grant See what this business pays to. That is how a bookkeeping integration picks up the invoices, and how an assistant can answer what you pay without anybody opening this page.
Nothing outside Bottle can change what you pay. Moving plan, cancelling and touching the card are for an owner who is signed in.