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Credits and top-ups

What a credit is, what consumes them, why fallback replies are free, the burn alerts, how top-up packs work (paid only), and what happens when you run out.

A credit is the unit of AI usage, mapped to real provider cost. Paid plans grant a monthly credit allowance; usage draws it down. Plan credit is use-it-or-lose-it — the month's unspent allowance does not roll into the next month.

What consumes credits

  • Answering a visitor's question — including retrieval, re-ranking, and classification, not only the final reply.
  • Voice calls, which debit a per-minute rate on top of the per-turn cost, billed in six-second increments when the call ends. See Voice.
  • Actions the agent runs.
  • Copilot drafts and summaries.
  • Topic clustering and eval runs.
  • Embedding your knowledge sources when they are processed.

Human replies in the inbox cost nothing. A fallback reply — the canned message the assistant sends when no knowledge matched — makes no model call, so it costs no credits and does not count against a Free plan's quota.

The ledger

The billing page shows your balance, live usage bars, and a recent ledger of grants and debits. At each renewal the ledger carries an Expired unused credits row — the previous month's leftover plan credit forfeited just before the new month is granted. Credit figures on Analytics count a wider population than the billing ledger — see Analytics overview for why the two differ.

Burn alerts

The workspace owner is emailed at 50%, 80%, and 100% of the cycle's credit allowance — once per threshold per cycle. Adding a top-up re-arms the ladder, so you are warned again on the new balance rather than going quiet. A renewal resets the cycle too, so the ladder starts fresh against the new month's allowance.

Credit balance and recent ledger on the billing page
Credit balance and recent ledger on the billing page

Top-up packs

One-time credit packs are bought self-serve from the billing page; Stripe Checkout opens in a new tab, and the billing page refreshes when you come back. What to know:

  • They are only sold on a paid plan. On Free the pack tiles don't appear, and a direct checkout attempt is refused with a 422 ("Credit packs are available on paid plans…") before any Stripe call — bought credit would just sit idle until you upgrade.
  • They never expire.
  • They need no plan change — a busy month does not have to become a bigger subscription.
  • They are the only credit that survives a renewal. When a renewal forfeits the previous month's unspent plan credit, your purchased packs are left untouched (and an in-flight AI turn's reserved credit is held back from the forfeit too).
  • They may be limited per month. The platform can cap how many packs an account buys per calendar month (UTC). When a limit applies, the billing page shows how many are left this month; at zero the packs are disabled until the 1st, and a checkout attempt is refused with the reset date.

Reselling? Your organisation buys packs straight into its shared pool instead of onto one workspace — see Pooled credits and caps.

Running out

The AI pauses as soon as the balance can't cover one more reply — under 50 credits — rather than at exactly zero, and the billing page says so from that point. Exhaustion is handled gracefully rather than as an error:

  • Visitors get a friendly "assistant is unavailable" reply, not a billing message.
  • The voice agent says the equivalent.
  • The owner sees a clear "you're out — top up or upgrade" banner on Billing, and an AI replies are paused banner on the Overview and each chatbot's Channels tab.
  • An AI-first channel hands the message to your team inbox with a line saying why; once credits are back, the customer's next message is answered by the AI again (Channels overview).
  • Human handoff keeps working, so your team can still answer.

Programmatically, a request refused for exhausted budget is USAGE_LIMIT_REACHED with HTTP 402.

Where to go next

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