What actually uses my credit, and what is included for free?

Every plan gives you unlimited texting, calling, conversations and AI replies to your customers. None of these are hard-capped or ever switched off. The AI that answers your customers is included with your plan, your usage is tracked, but you are never charged extra for it and it is never paused for using a lot. What changes is whether something is covered by your plan's free monthly amount, or comes out of your SMS & Voice wallet once that free amount runs out.

Your balance

You have one balance: the SMS & Voice wallet. It is money you add yourself, see How do I top up my credit? Texts, calls, and AI Workspace answers for your team can all draw from it once their own free monthly amount is used up. It is shown on your Billing page, along with roughly how many texts or voice minutes it covers at current rates.

What is included, and what draws from your balance

• Conversations have a free monthly quota included in your plan. After that quota is used, conversations keep going exactly as before, the extra ones are simply billed from your wallet, nothing pauses or blocks.
• SMS and voice minutes work the same way: your plan's free allowance covers the ordinary case, anything beyond it comes out of your wallet.
• AI replying to your customers is never charged and never stopped for usage. It is tracked so you can see how much your business uses it, but nothing pauses it and nothing is billed for it. So are the AI helpers: Format with AI in your knowledge base, suggested journeys, suggested task templates, suggested automations, and the AI Assistant setup helpers (drafting your assistant from a description, Draft with AI for a skill's questions, and Enhance with AI for your system prompt).
• AI Workspace, the chat tool for you and your team, gives every seat 10 free answers each month, pooled across your business. After that, each answer is billed from your wallet at a small per-answer price (on the free plan answers are never billed: upgrade for more), see What is the AI Workspace, and how is it different from the AI that answers my customers?
• Monthly active contacts, on plans that have an allowance for this, is the one thing that is not paid from your wallet directly, going over is added to the end of your invoice in blocks, see Where do I see how much I have used this period?
• Team seats are the one part of your account that stays a hard plan limit rather than something a balance pays for, see What happens when I run out of seats?

What happens when you go over

If you use more texts, calls or conversations than your plan's free amount in a period, your account keeps working exactly as before, the difference is simply taken from your wallet. The one thing that can interrupt them is running the wallet all the way to zero with no card on file to top it up, see How do I top up my credit? for how to set up automatic top-ups so that never happens by surprise.

The AI answering your customers is never interrupted this way, it is never charged and never paused, whatever happens to your wallet. Only AI Workspace answers past your team's free monthly amount need money in the wallet: if it runs dry, the next answer is refused with a message to add credit, your team just tops up and asks again.

If you instead see "AI is temporarily unavailable", that is a short outage on our side, not your usage. Nothing is charged for it, just try again in a few minutes.