Pay-as-you-go
Keep working past your monthly allowance, up to a cap you set.
By default, when you use up your monthly allowance, Clusy drops you back to the free Auto-on-CPU loop until the next cycle. You keep working, but without the metered extras. Pay-as-you-go is the optional alternative: keep using the metered models and runtimes past the allowance, up to a monthly cap you set.
How it works
Turn it on in Settings → Billing and set a monthly cap, the most you're willing to spend beyond your plan. With it on, metered work keeps going when the allowance runs out instead of degrading, and it keeps going until your usage past the allowance reaches the cap. At the cap, metered work stops and you're back on the free Auto-on-CPU loop, exactly as you would have been without pay-as-you-go.
The cap is the point. It's not an open tab. It's "let me go up to this much, no further."
The cap is the only guardrail
There is exactly one limit here: the monthly cap. There is no per-run limit, and that's a decision, not an omission.
Inside your allowance, a run is uncapped by design. A per-run ceiling used to exist and was removed, because it killed legitimate work: an hour-long agentic GPU run would be paused mid-flight for no reason a user could see. So a run that starts inside your allowance always finishes. The bound on an overrun is the check on the next run, which sees the allowance is gone and degrades.
Past the allowance, with pay-as-you-go on, the remaining cap behaves differently: it's a real ceiling, and it applies during a run, not just before it. A run that would carry you past the cap is stopped there.
How you're billed for it
Overage isn't charged as you go. It's totalled once the calendar month closes and billed on a separate Stripe invoice in the following cycle, so a run is never interrupted by a payment.
Two things worth knowing. You are never billed past your cap — the cap bounds the invoice, not just the usage that triggers it, so the number you set is the most that can appear on the bill. And only the month that just closed is ever invoiced: Clusy doesn't reach back and bill overage from earlier months.
Your current month's usage is always visible in Settings → Billing before it becomes an invoice.
Who can use it
Pay-as-you-go is a paid-plan feature, since it extends an allowance you already have. It isn't offered on the free tier, where the path to more is an upgrade, not a cap. See Plans.
Set the cap to a number you'd be fine paying
Treat the monthly cap as the amount you wouldn't mind being charged this month. Set it there and you get the convenience of not being interrupted mid-task, without an open-ended commitment.
Switch it off any time in Settings → Billing. On a paid plan the free Auto and CPU loop keeps working either way.