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Updated May 8, 2026Raff’s billing has a few moving parts that look more complicated than they are. This page walks through the whole money flow on one canvas, so the rules you’ll encounter elsewhere — credit on delete, balance applied first, rotation to the 1st — fit together.
Money on a Raff account lives in one of two places:
Container
What it is
When it’s used
Account balance
A prepaid pool of credit on your account
Always applied first at checkout
Saved card
Cards you’ve used at checkout, stored on file
Charged for any remainder the balance can’t cover
You don’t have to top up the balance before using Raff — the dashboard checkout will charge the card for the full amount if your balance is $0. Balance just sits in front of the card; whatever’s there gets used first.
Raff accepts ten payment methods at checkout — seven major card networks and three digital wallets — processed through Airwallex.
Payment Method
Type
Visa
Cards
Mastercard
Cards
American Express
Cards
Discover
Cards
JCB
Cards
Diners Club
Cards
UnionPay
Cards
Apple Pay
Wallet
Google Pay
Wallet
Airwallex Pay
Wallet
Cards are saved on file when you check out the first time and reused for renewals. Wallets work the same way — you authorize once at checkout, and the wallet is the saved-payment-method for renewals afterwards. Add, remove, or reorder methods at any time from Settings → Payment Methods.
When your card-issuing bank requires a step-up authentication (3D Secure 2 / SCA in Europe, equivalent rails for other regions), Airwallex’s flow surfaces the challenge inline at checkout:
You click Activate Subscription (or Top up balance)
Airwallex routes the auth through your bank
If the bank requires 3DS, an inline modal appears asking for the challenge — usually a one-time code from your banking app, an SMS, or a biometric prompt in your bank’s mobile app
After you complete the challenge, the auth completes and the subscription / top-up is confirmed
Some specific behaviors to know:
Frictionless 3DS — if your bank can authorize without challenging (low-risk transactions, well-known device + IP combo), the flow completes without showing you a modal at all. Both paths are still 3DS-authenticated; one just doesn’t ask
Failed 3DS — if you cancel the challenge, enter the wrong code too many times, or the bank declines, checkout shows the failure with a 3DS authentication failed message. Try again or pick a different card
Saved cards — first checkout authenticates the card. Subsequent renewals from the same card are typically frictionless (Airwallex’s Merchant-Initiated Transaction flow handles re-auth invisibly), unless your bank specifically requires re-challenge
Wallet-paid purchases (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Airwallex Pay) — the wallet’s own biometric is the SCA equivalent; no separate 3DS modal appears
When you confirm a purchase in the dashboard, the order summary always shows three lines:
Line
What it means
Subtotal
Full price of what you’re buying
Account Balance
How much of your existing balance gets applied to this purchase
Card Charge
Whatever’s left after balance — charged to the card you pick
If your balance covers the subtotal, Total Due is $0 and you click Activate Subscription — no card charge. Otherwise the card form is presented, the difference is charged, and the card is saved for future renewals (removable in Settings → Payment Methods).The 14-day money-back guarantee applies to subscription purchases made through the dashboard checkout.
When something gives you money back — delete a VM mid-term, downsize a plan, hit an SLA credit — Raff returns the value as account balance, not as a card refund.
Original purchase amount back; balance vs card depends on the original payment path
Credits sit in your balance and apply to the next purchase, renewal, or top-up. They don’t go back to the original payment method. They are not refunded to your card.This is why “refund” is the wrong mental model — it’s “credit forward.”
By default, every Raff account’s billing rotates to the 1st of the month within two cycles. This happens automatically with no setting to toggle.
Cycle
What happens
Month 1 — create
Pay the full subscription term from your create date
Month 2 — normalization
At renewal, system charges a prorated amount for the days between the renewal date and the upcoming 1st
Month 3 onward — aligned
Every renewal lands on the 1st — one consolidated invoice across all your resources
The month-2 prorated charge is always smaller than a full month — it covers only the gap. After the single correction, every VM, volume, snapshot, backup, and Public IP renews on the 1st with clear per-resource line items. They share an invoice; they don’t merge into a lump sum.See Pricing → Billing-date alignment for the worked example.
When a paid action fails for billing reasons via the API, the response is one of:
Status
Reason
Meaning
403
banned / failed / no_billing_customer
Account isn’t in good standing — contact support
402
(plain error)
Balance insufficient and the card path didn’t satisfy the cost
Through the dashboard, you’ll typically see the checkout page block before any of this surfaces — it tells you exactly what’s happening (balance shortfall, card declined, etc.) before resources are created.
