Manual vs auto top-up options using the Sinch Build Dashboard?

After you have made your first payment using the Sinch Build Dashboard, you have the option to use our auto top up feature via PayPal. With auto top up, you can set a credit value to automatically be charged to your PayPal account (for customers in the US) or your credit card ( for customers in other countries) as soon as your account balance goes under 10% of your defined top-up value.

Note: The Auto-top feature using Paypal is only available for customers in the US. Customers in other countries can use their registered credit cards for auto top up.

If you do not want to use this feature, just leave it blank and use the manual top up option. Using manual top up, you can add credit when needed, but if you ran out of credit, your call will not be connected.

If you decide to use the auto Top-up feature, it’s important that you set your top-up quantity to a value that is compatible to your balance burn rate, so you minimize the risk of running out of balance, due to lack of time to process your payment.

For example:

Customer (A) initiates 1000k calls per hour, and his burn rate is around 100USD per minute. The top-up value set on his account is 1000USD per auto top-up event, which means that, when his balance < 100USD (10% of 1000USD) Sinch will trigger the Auto top-up. This will give us only 1 minute to successfully process the PayPal debit and credit the 1000USD into their Sinch Balance.

If for some reason this process gets delayed for more than 1 minute. Or the burn rate increases for a short period of time, there is a reasonable risk that the account may run out of “money”.

In this case, to avoid such situation, the top-up value should be set to 2k, maybe 5k USD, which will trigger the top-up action when the balance is 200 or 500USD, giving more time to the process to be successfully completed.

Refer to the Sinch Voice Calling product page to learn more about Sinch’s Voice products and for details of pricing.