Billing Preview
The Billing Preview page answers one question: who is about to get billed? Pick a month and it lists every platform, with the accounts under it that will be billed for that month, alongside the rates that will apply.
Use it to review the upcoming month before a billing run, rather than finding out from the run's output afterwards.
The month picker offers the next month and the current month only. Earlier months have already been invoiced, and the preview always calculates from today's rates and exclusions — so it would show what a run today would produce, not what was actually billed. Check a past month against the billing run's own output instead.
Super-admin only — the page shows buy rates (what the platform pays DialStack), which must never be visible to a platform admin.
Reading the table
Platforms are the shaded rows; the accounts that will bill are indented beneath them.
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| Platform | The platform. Click through to its detail page. |
| Account | An account that will be billed for the selected month. |
| Mode | Always live — sandbox accounts are never billed. |
| Billable from | The effective billing start: the later of the account's and platform's dates. |
| Sell | What the platform charges its customer, per user / per number / per VoiceAI location. |
| Buy | What the platform pays DialStack, same three rates. |
A rate marked default means no agreed rate covers that month, so the standard catalog rate applies. A contracted rate and a default look the same otherwise, so check this before assuming a price was negotiated.
Rates are shown as of the selected month. If a rate change was made mid-month, it takes effect the following month, and the preview shows the rate that will actually be applied — not the newer pending one.
Why an account might be missing
An account is absent from the preview when any of the following is true:
- Its own or its platform's Billable from is not set, or is later than the selected month (see Billing Opt-In).
- It is a sandbox account, or has been deleted.
- Its platform is suspended or cancelled.
- It has an active billing exclusion (below).
The preview deliberately shows only what will be billed. If you expect an account and don't see it, work through the list above.
Excluding a platform or account from billing
The Billable from date cannot be changed or cleared once set. So if a platform or account was turned on by mistake — an internal, test, or demo platform, say — there is no way to turn it back off. A billing exclusion is how you stop it being billed.
Hover the row and click the Exclude from billing action. You must:
- Enter a reason. This is required — it's the note that explains the exclusion to whoever reviews it later.
- Type the confirmation word to enable the button.
Once excluded, the row disappears from the preview. That's the confirmation: the next billing run will skip it entirely.
Scope. Excluding a platform stops every account under it from being billed — the dialog tells you how many. Excluding an account affects only that account.
This cannot be undone from the portal. There is deliberately no way to remove an exclusion here — no button, and no API the portal can call. Reversing one requires an engineer with database access, so treat the confirmation dialog as the last chance to change your mind. Excluding a platform is the higher-stakes version: it covers every account under it, including accounts that only become billable later.
What it does not do. An exclusion prevents future billing. It does not credit, reverse, or undo anything already invoiced. Excluding something that has already been billed for a past month does not unwind that charge.
Timing. Exclusions apply whenever a run is evaluated, including a re-run of an earlier month. A month that was billed before the exclusion existed stays billed; re-running that month afterwards will skip the excluded entity.
Every exclusion is recorded in the audit log with who created it and why.
Seeing an exclusion on a platform or account
Once something is excluded it disappears from this page, so the exclusion is also shown where you'd look next: next to Billable from on the platform detail page and on the account General tab. Both are super-admin only.
An excluded entity shows an Excluded from billing badge beside the field, plus the reason. The badge sits next to the date deliberately — a billing start date on its own reads as "this is billing", which is no longer true.
For an account excluded because its platform is excluded, the message names that platform ("Excluded from billing because platform X is excluded"). That matters: the account has no exclusion of its own, so the platform's is the one that would have to be reversed.