Getting Started🔗︎
Overview🔗︎
Sub-Accounts are a way to buy a single bucket of credits, and divide it between multiple accounts. Sub-Accounts give you:
- Flexibility: You have full control. Buy one bucket of credits and allocate them to fit your needs. Reallocate at any time.
- Protection: Don't let one sub-account's usage run through credits for all the other sub-accounts.
- Insight: Track API usage and metrics for each account individually.
Why Use Sub-Accounts🔗︎
Sub-Accounts have several significant use-cases, but one common one is to have a different SaaS account for each one of your customers so you can limit their credits as needed and track their usage individually. Another common use-case is to set up a staging account with access to only a small portion of your credits that can be used for your own testing and development.
Sub-Accounts should be treated as individual, independent accounts. This means that for Search & Match customers, documents indexed with sub-accounts cannot be accessed by any other sub-account. This also means that custom skills and normalization lists are unique to each individual sub-account.
Managing Sub-Accounts🔗︎
Sub-Accounts can be fully managed through your Tx Console. Here you can create new sub-accounts, view how many credits they have remaining, allocate and remove credits, and update the name and status of each sub-account.
Some customers need a way to programatically manage sub-accounts. This can be done via the Sub-Accounts API
Allocating Credits🔗︎
There are two different ways to allocate among sub-accounts:
- Unrestricted
- By Credit Amount
Unrestricted sub-accounts have the ability to use every credit you have purchased and will not lose service until you run out.
Accounts restricted by credit amount can only use the assigned amount of credits. This acts as a limt on how many of the main account's credits the sub-account is permitted to use. Once the account has used all the credits it has been allocated, it will begin to recieve 401 - Unauthorized responses, but will not be charged any further.
Important Credit Information🔗︎
There are a few important things to understand about how credits and sub-accounts work:
Credits Expiration and Availability🔗︎
- When credits are purchased, they have an expiration date. If your account's credits expire or run out, all sub-accounts are affected, regardless of their individual credit balances. This means even if a sub-account has credits allocated, it will not be able to use those credits if your credits are expired or empty.
- The sub-account's credits are effectively a subset of your credits. The allocation to a sub-account is like setting a cap on usage, not a separate pool of credits.
Best Practices for Managing Sub-Accounts🔗︎
- If a sub-account is a critical part of your operations (e.g., a production environment), consider setting it to "unrestricted" to ensure it can access the entire pool of credits from the main account as needed.
- Regularly monitor your account's credit balance and expiration date to avoid any disruptions in service, as all sub-accounts rely on the availability of the main account's credits.