Billing & usage credits
VoiceThere bills real-time voice and agent workloads with usage credits. Credits are a single balance unit across voice time, data sessions, speech services, conversation history, and agent logs. Totals in the dashboard and API are shown to one decimal place (for example 3.3 credits).
How usage is measured
Each billable activity converts to credits using fixed rates. Period totals use raw quantities first — we do not round up per session before summing.
| Activity | Unit | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Voice agent time | per minute | 2 credits |
| Data agent time | per minute | 0.5 credits |
| Speech-to-text (local Sherpa) | per 1,000 characters | 1 credit |
| Text-to-speech (local Sherpa) | per minute of audio | 3 credits |
| Conversation history (overage) | per conversation | 1 credit |
| Agent log overage | per 1,000 entries | 1 credit |
Speech-to-text and text-to-speech rows apply when your agent uses in-runner local Sherpa. Conversation and agent-log rows apply only after your plan's included quotas for those features.
Subscriptions & included credits
A paid subscription is a seat you assign to exactly one projectat a time. That project receives a monthly included credit allotment based on the seat's plan tier. Included credits refresh at the start of each billing period (aligned with your Stripe subscription or, on the free tier, monthly anniversary from signup).
| Plan | Included credits / period |
|---|---|
| Free | 5,000 credits |
| Budget | 10,000 credits |
| Budget+ | 20,000 credits |
| Advanced | 75,000 credits |
| Ultimate | 175,000 credits |
Unused included credits do not roll over to the next billing period. When a new period starts, included balance resets to the full allotment for that tier.
If you move a seat to a different project, the remaining included balance moves with the seat. Credit packs (below) stay on the project that purchased them.
Manage seats under Organization → Subscriptions. Assign or reassign a seat to a project from the subscription detail view.
Credit packs
Credit packs are one-time purchases tied to a specific project. They add credits on top of subscription included balance and persist across billing periods until used.
- Packs burn in FIFO order (oldest pack first).
- Buy packs from Project → Metrics or from Subscriptions (select the target project first).
| Pack | Credits granted |
|---|---|
| $10 pack | 11500.0 credits |
| $25 pack | 32500.0 credits |
| $50 pack | 67500.0 credits |
Burn order
When usage is settled, credits are consumed in this order:
- Included — subscription allotment for the assigned project
- Credit packs — oldest pack first (FIFO)
- Metered overage — on-demand usage billed through Stripe (paid tiers with metered usage enabled)
- Hard-stop — new sessions and certain operations are blocked when no credits remain and your organization or project budget does not allow further spend
On the free tier, there is no metered overage — when included and pack credits are exhausted, usage stops until the next period or you add packs / upgrade.
Organization & project budgets
Spend caps are organization-authoritative. An optional organization budget limits total metered cash spend for the month. You can set a lower per-project budget, but a project cap cannot exceed the org cap.
- Configure budgets in Organization → Settings.
- Email alerts can fire at 80%, 90%, and 100% of the org budget (toggle per threshold).
- When a budget is reached, affected projects hard-stop even if subscription included credits remain (included credits do not bypass a spend cap).
Cash pricing
VoiceThere billing is USD only for now. One usage credit = $0.001 USD (one tenth of a cent). This rate applies when estimating pack value and when metered overage is charged.
On paid tiers with metered overage enabled, when included subscription credits and purchased credit packs are exhausted, additional usage is billed as metered overage through your payment method on file. The free tier does not offer metered overage — usage stops when included and pack balances are gone (see burn order above).
Budget settings cap how much metered cash your organization can accrue in a billing period. Set an organization budget in Organization → Settings; optional per-project caps cannot exceed the org cap. Email alerts can fire at 80%, 90%, and 100%. When a budget is reached, affected projects hard-stop even if subscription included credits remain — see Organization & project budgets above.
Subscription plan prices, pack bonuses, and example session costs are on the pricing page.
See also
- Pricing — plans, packs, and usage examples
- STT & TTS vendors — providers, Sherpa models, and credentials
- Agent logs & session errors — log retention and overage
- Control plane API — usage and billing API fields