# Funding your wallet and what you pay

> The advertiser money story end to end: topping up from $5 via Stripe, billing only on verified events at your current bid, and what the wallet can never do.

- Source: https://awaitful.com/docs/funding-and-charges
- Updated: July 19, 2026

The advertiser money story, end to end: how the wallet is funded, exactly when you are charged, and what your balance can and cannot do. Money copy here is exact or absent - where a number is tunable, the dashboard shows the live value.

## Topping up

You fund your wallet by card through Stripe checkout: $5 minimum, $10,000 maximum per top-up. You load what you pay - the full amount is credited to your balance, and the card processing fee is absorbed by the platform, not deducted from you. Whenever the server is running play money, the dashboard banners test mode before you fund; practice numbers are reset when real payments go live.

## When you are charged

Only two events ever bill: a [verified impression](https://awaitful.com/docs/verified-impressions) and a verified click. Each is priced at your current bid at the moment of the event - not the bid when the slate was drawn - and a click bills 50x that placement's impression price. A line that is drawn into a slate but never genuinely seen costs nothing, ever. That is the whole billing model; there are no serving fees, no minimum spends, and no charges for the quiet minutes when [the house fallback](https://awaitful.com/docs/house-ads) serves instead.

## Wallet versus daily budget

The two are different controls. Your wallet is real money; your [daily budget](https://awaitful.com/docs/bidding-and-budgets) is a cap on how much of it one campaign may spend per UTC day. The budget is a cap, not a hold: nothing is reserved when a campaign goes live. Creating a campaign requires your balance to cover its daily budget, and so does raising one - a campaign can never promise money the wallet does not hold. A campaign that spends its full budget is marked exhausted and does not put itself back on the air.

## One balance, from the ledger

Your balance is not a counter that drifts; it is derived from the same balanced double-entry ledger every charge is booked through (see [The 70% split](https://awaitful.com/docs/the-split) for where each charge goes). And if you also code with Awaitful on the same account, the two sides never mix: developer earnings can never be spent as ad budget, by construction.

**Refunds and disputes**

Because billing happens only on verified events, disputes are rare by design - there is no charge to argue about for an ad nobody saw. If something on your statement looks wrong, write to support@awaitful.com with the campaign and the day, and a human will trace it through the ledger with you.