Billing
Free trial, plans, credits, top-ups, and what is metered today.
Billing is managed per billing owner — your personal account, or an organization you own or administer. You manage it in Settings → Billing; if you manage an organization, a context switcher lets you view its billing separately from your own.
Free trial and plans
- Free trial — you get one. Starting it saves a card with Stripe; nothing is charged during the trial and nothing renews on its own. The banner shows Free trial — N days left, and when it ends its remaining trial credits expire.
- Plans — subscribe through Stripe checkout; manage or cancel in the Stripe Customer Portal from the same page.
- Top-ups — buy a pack of extra credits at any time.
The page also shows your credit balance broken down by grant source and your recent billing activity.
What needs a trial or plan
- Creating a community requires a live free trial, plan, or contract — app administrators excepted, who are exempt from this and from the plan's community limit (see Create & configure). The free trial also caps how many communities you can own and how many profiles each holds; the paid plans set no such limit today.
- Importing members from the admin console (CSV, LinkedIn and CRM imports) and Smart Enrich can additionally be gated on the community's plan being live. This gate is off by default; when it is on, a lapsed community is refused with a message that names the billing page, while the community, its members, and search keep working. Event guest synchronisation is not covered: guests imported from a connected event platform are still created and still join the community, and only the automatic Smart Enrich run that follows can be refused.
What uses credits
AI-heavy operations consume credits — most notably search (in the app, from the chat bots, and through the API) and enrichment. Enrichment shows a credit estimate and an over-budget warning before you launch a run (see Enrichment). Who pays for a search is decided per search: by default you pay from your own balance. An organization that owns the community can cover your searches there in two ways:
- Standing funding — uncapped, for any member of the owning organization, switched on per deployment.
- A delegation rule — a capped budget the organization sets for itself, for a single community, or for a single event. This one is not behind the standing-funding switch, so it can cover you even where standing funding is off. The composer badge shows the credits remaining in that budget. Read it as a ceiling, not a per-search guarantee: a charge is all-or-nothing against the budget, so the first search that would cost more than the remainder is billed to your own balance instead — which can happen while the badge still shows credits left.
A community owned by a person never covers your searches. A search across all your communities is not covered by any community either — but it is not automatically personal: it resolves against a global search wallet, which is your saved preference if you set one, else your own balance, else the earliest organization you joined that has credits. So an organization can end up paying for it without any community being involved. Enrichment is the other way round — a community enrichment run is always charged to that community's billing owner.
Metering is live; hard blocking is not (yet). Distinguish two things:
- Debiting (metering) — credit debits are active for the search family (fast search, deep search, team composition, follow-ups, web enrichment), the three enrichment tiers, and member-paid self-enrichment. These operations deduct credits today, charged after the fact by the post-hoc biller.
- AI interviews also debit, and they work differently enough to call out separately:
0.1 credits per generated turn, held and settled inline as each turn is produced
rather than billed afterwards. This covers both the event intake interview and the profile
interview — despite the operation being named
event_ai_interviewinternally, the charge is not limited to events. It is the member being interviewed, not an admin, who initiates the charge — but not necessarily who pays it: an event interview passes its community and event to the gate, so an organization owning that community can absorb it through standing funding or a matching delegation. A profile interview carries no community and so normally stays personal. The switch below does not hold the charge back either: enforcement decides whether someone without credits is refused, not whether someone with credits is charged. Templated verification turns are not billed, because no model is called. - Blocking (enforcement) — no operation refuses to run on an insufficient balance today. The limits that do block are the trial and plan entitlement caps (community and profile counts) and the community-creation gate above.
Enforcement is being rolled out in stages, so what blocks (vs. only debits) may change.
Treat this page as a snapshot. Settings → Billing always shows the live state of your balance, plan, and recent activity — check there before relying on a specific metering or blocking behavior.