Credits and throttling

Every request to a model uses credits. How many depends on the model and on the amount of text it processes: your message, the chat so far, attached files and the reply. One credit equals one cent in your workspace's billing currency.

Credits are not an extra price. They are included in your seats, and Custodos invoices nothing beyond the allowance. When the budget is used up, you keep working on a cheaper model instead of running up costs. The throttling section below describes this.

Every seat brings a fixed number of credits each month, a bigger seat more than a smaller one. Normally a seat's credits are the personal monthly budget of the person who sits in it. Admins cannot raise this budget separately: more budget comes with a bigger seat, see Plans and seats.

Unused credits do not pass to colleagues and expire at the end of the billing month. On the billing day a new month starts with a full budget.

If your workspace holds a Pack balance, it does not expire. Someone who has used up their monthly budget draws on that balance first, before throttling applies.

Credits are used wherever a model works or an external service is queried. The model picker shows an estimate per reply for every model. The actual amount is only known once the reply is complete.

Once you have used 90% of your personal monthly budget, a note appears below the message field: Your monthly budget is nearly used up. It resets on …. The date appears in place of the dots.

This is the only advance notice. Custodos does not send an e-mail about it. If the workspace holds a pack balance, the note does not appear, because you will continue on that balance.

Members do not see a running count of their budget. Admins find the figures per person on the Usage page.

When the budget is used up, Custodos does not lock the chat. You keep working on a low-cost model until the budget resets on the billing day. The note in the chat names that model. Until then the model picker is locked and shows Model locked while the monthly credits are used up.

Throttling applies to one person when their monthly budget is used up, and to everyone when the credits of the whole workspace are used up.

The economy model keeps answering your messages. Everything that would cause extra cost pauses until the reset:

• Switching the model.
• Web search.
• Generating images.
• Access to connected cloud accounts and to Outlook in the chat.
• The model's own search in the Company Brain. Relevant passages from the selected Brains are still passed along.
• The help in the Create tab when setting up an agent. The fields can still be filled in by hand.
• The summary of new documents in the Company Brain. Documents with text are still added and searchable. Scanned pages and images that a model first has to read are not processed during this time.

On the billing day a new month starts and everyone works with the model of their choice again. Throttling ends earlier when credits become available again.

For a single person, a bigger seat helps: a higher seat applies immediately and brings its budget with it. If the credits of the whole workspace are used up, additional or bigger seats help. If you need more credits beyond that, contact the Custodos team.