Credits & Usage — Help Center
What a credit is, what spends credits, what is free, and how to read your workspace usage.
What is a credit and how does the wallet work?
Credits are prepaid AI work value held in a single workspace credit wallet. Everyone in your workspace draws from the same balance.
- When you buy credits, 100 credits = $1.00 of workspace usage value. Credits are always shown as whole numbers.
- Credits are workspace-wide, not per person. There is no separate per-user allowance to assign or track.
- Purchased credits stack and never expire while your account remains in good standing.
- Buying credits is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. There is no monthly credit renewal date.
Your balance appears on the wallet readout in the app and in Account -> Billing. Owners can add credits at any time. Members can see the balance and ask an owner to add more.
What actually uses credits?
Credits are spent when PrecisionDocs runs AI work on your behalf. Reading and navigating work you already paid for is free.
| Activity | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Project setup | Creating a project and building its knowledge base: parcel resolution, jurisdiction and ordinance indexing, government and GIS lookups, and the automatic assessments produced during bootstrap |
| AI chat | Each agent turn in project chat, including the retrieval, research, and tool calls the agent runs to answer you |
| Document ingestion | Processing documents you upload so they become searchable and citable in the project |
| Deliverables | Generating reports, feasibility assessments, schedules, map exports, and other downloadable outputs |
| Adding parcels | Extending an existing project with additional parcels, which extends its knowledge base |
| Connector and email work | The same work requested through the API, an MCP connector, or Email my agent |
These are the same categories shown in Account -> Usage, so what you are charged for and what you can inspect line up.
Project setup is normally the largest single charge on a project, because the knowledge base is built once, up front. Later questions reuse it and are much lighter.
What does not use credits?
Reading, reviewing, and re-downloading what you have already produced does not spend credits.
- Opening projects, browsing Project Home, and re-reading past chat threads
- Viewing maps and layers already loaded on the project
- Re-downloading a report, export, or other deliverable you already generated
- Checking project status, bootstrap progress, and your wallet balance
- Inviting teammates, managing members, and changing account or profile settings
The same rule applies over connectors: read-only calls such as project polling, site knowledge, message history, report status, artifact listing, and wallet checks are free. Knowledge-base search is a flat 2 credits per call.
If a run fails or is cancelled partway, you are charged only for the work that actually ran before it stopped. The rest of the hold goes back to the wallet.
Why does one request cost more credits than another?
Credits measure the amount of work a request actually takes, so heavier work uses more credits. It is not a flat price per message.
What makes a request heavier:
- How much reasoning it needs. A direct lookup against facts already in the project is far lighter than a multi-step feasibility or constraint analysis.
- How many sources it has to touch. Questions that fan out across ordinances, government APIs, GIS layers, and uploaded documents run more retrieval than questions answered from one source.
- How much material it has to read. Large ordinances and long uploaded documents take more work to index and search.
- What it produces. A chat answer is lighter than a generated report, exhibit, or GIS export.
Because of this, two questions of similar length can cost different amounts. Usage is metered at PrecisionDocs usage rates, which are not a word or message count.
If you want to keep a project light: let bootstrap finish before asking ordinance questions, ask focused questions rather than broad ones, and generate deliverables when you actually need them rather than to preview them.
Why do I see credits reserved before the work finishes?
When you start work whose final size is not known up front - creating a project, running an agent turn, ingesting a document - PrecisionDocs places a reserve: a temporary hold on enough credits to cover it.
The hold exists so that two people working at the same time cannot both spend the last of the balance.
When the work finishes:
- Your wallet is debited for what the work actually used.
- Anything held but not used is released back to the wallet.
- If the work is cancelled or fails partway, only the portion that ran is debited.
Reserved credits are shown separately from your available balance. A balance that looks lower than expected during a bootstrap usually has a reserve behind it that has not settled yet.
Where do I see what credits were used on?
Account -> Usage is the record of workspace spend.
- Recent - a chart plus a dated activity feed of individual charges
- Projects - spend rolled up per project, so you can see which sites are consuming the balance
- Users - spend rolled up per member; select a member to filter the Recent feed to their activity
Filter the window by 7 days, 30 days, or All time.
Activity is labelled by what produced it, using the same categories as above, and by where it came from: in-app work, API for OpenAPI connector activity, MCP for MCP server activity, and Email for Email my agent. Some rows appear with no credit charge - work that PrecisionDocs absorbed, comped, or ran during a pilot is listed for transparency but is not debited.
Account -> Billing shows the balance itself, credits used in the selected period, auto-refill settings, payment method, and invoices for credit purchases.
What happens when the wallet runs low or empty?
PrecisionDocs warns you before it blocks anything, and stops rather than overdrawing your wallet.
- Running low - the wallet readout changes tone and Billing shows a low-balance note.
- Almost empty - you are prompted to add credits to keep working.
- Empty - new AI work stops. Owners see Add credits; members are asked to request credits from a workspace owner. Email my agent replies with the same guidance instead of running, and connector calls return an insufficient-credits error.
Nothing is lost when the wallet empties. Projects, documents, chat history, and generated deliverables stay exactly as they are, and work resumes as soon as credits are added.
If a piece of work ends up costing more than your balance could cover, PrecisionDocs absorbs the difference rather than putting the wallet into a negative balance.
How does auto-refill work?
Auto-refill keeps the wallet from hitting zero in the middle of a project. It is triggered by your balance, not by a calendar date - there is no monthly renewal for credits.
- You choose a threshold - the balance at which a refill should trigger.
- You choose a refill package - how many credits are added when it does.
- When your balance drops to the threshold, your saved payment method is charged for that package and the credits are added to the wallet.
Auto-refill is on by default after your first credit purchase, and you can turn it off at any time in Account -> Billing. It needs a saved payment method; without one, Billing prompts you to add one before auto-refill can run.
You can always buy credits on demand with Add credits, whether or not auto-refill is on. Changing your refill package does not charge you today unless your balance is already below the threshold.
How are API, MCP connector, and email requests charged?
Every surface draws on the same workspace credit wallet. Integrations have no separate meter and no separate rate.
- Work requested through a connector is charged exactly as the same work in the app: creating a project reserves setup credits, an agent turn is charged as an agent turn, generating a report is charged as a deliverable.
- Read-only connector calls are free, and knowledge-base search is a flat 2 credits per call.
- Usage and billing views label OpenAPI connector activity as API, MCP server activity as MCP, and Email my agent activity as Email, so integration spend is easy to separate from in-app spend.
- If the wallet is empty, connector calls that would spend credits return an insufficient-credits error instead of running.
Owners can also set optional daily and monthly credit caps on an individual API key in Account -> API keys, so a single integration cannot consume the whole wallet. Caps are optional and are off unless you set them; a key that hits its cap returns a cap-exceeded error while the rest of the workspace keeps working.
See API & connectors in this help center for setup steps, and the developer documentation for the endpoint-level billing, cap, and error reference.
How do I buy more credits?
Workspace owners buy credits from Account -> Billing.
- Choose Add credits.
- Pick a credit package. Larger packages include bonus credits on top of the credits you buy.
- Complete checkout. Credits are added to the wallet immediately and never expire.
Purchases appear in Invoices on the Billing tab, and payment methods and receipts are managed through the Stripe portal from the same page.
Members cannot purchase credits. If you are blocked and you are not an owner, the app and email replies point you to request credits from a workspace owner.
For volume purchasing, procurement, or invoicing terms, contact info@precisiondocs.ai.