AI Credits & Limits
Two independent limits govern AI usage — worth understanding both:
- Credits — your company's monthly AI budget.
- Rate limits — how fast any one user can fire AI requests.
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Credits
Every AI call is metered by what it actually consumed — a one-word chat costs far less than a two-page analysis. The charge reflects:
- a small fixed fee per feature (heavier features have higher fees and minimums),
- the size of the request and the answer (tokens, including images for vision features),
- tool work (each tool call in a chat turn adds a little),
- compute time, and a small multiplier for structured/vision output.
Roughly, features rank by cost per call: Photo/Drawing analysis (most expensive) → BOM generation → Price OCR / Invoice Reader → Chat → agent sweeps (cheap — one batched call covers up to ~25 items) → GST Q&A (compute/validation itself is pure math and free; only Ask-AI costs credits).
The honest-metering rules
- Reserve → finalize → refund. A conservative estimate is reserved before the call; the exact charge is computed from real usage afterwards. Failed calls are refunded.
- Transparency. Every call stores its full breakdown, visible in your usage history.
- Out of credits? You'll see: "AI credit limit reached (X/Y). Buy a credit top-up or upgrade your plan on the Subscription page." Background jobs (OCR, Invoice Reader) check at submission, so you find out immediately. You're never locked out of an agent — top-ups are always available.
Rate limits
Per user, sliding-window. If you go too fast you'll get a friendly "You're making AI requests too quickly — please wait Ns" message. Typical limits:
| Feature | Per minute |
|---|---|
| Chat assistant | 20 |
| Photo / drawing / BOM analysis | 8 |
| Price OCR / Invoice Reader / Quote Studio | 6 |
| Agent sweeps (Collections, Follow-up, Procurement, Planner, GST) | 10 |
| Everything combined (global per user) | 40 |
Tracking your usage
- Per feature, inline — the Photo Analyzer sidebar, BOM draft cards, GST answers and the Daily Briefing footer all show credits used.
- Company-wide — the AI Usage Report (Reports page) and your subscription page show the monthly plan, credits used, credits available and the per-feature split.
Saving credits
- Use the BOM Spec Form (free) instead of AI generation when the panel is standard.
- Use Photo Analyzer Re-match (free) instead of Re-run AI when only the catalog or tiers changed.
- Provide enclosure dimensions in Auto Costing to make it deterministic and free.
- Clean text PDFs cost less than photos in OCR features.
- Trim Daily Briefing sections to what you actually read.
For what each plan includes, see Subscription Plans.