AI conversations meter, overage, and auto-recharge
How the unified AI meter counts conversations, plan caps, overage pricing, prepaid balance, and the auto-recharge trigger at $0.10.
Deskwoot bills AI usage with a single unified meter called AI conversations. One conversation counts at most once per calendar month, whether the live chat bot (Fynn) answered, an agent ran a Copilot action (suggest reply, summarize, translate, detect language), or both happened in the same thread.
What counts as one AI conversation
A conversation is added to the meter the first time any AI action touches it within the month. After that, every additional Copilot action or bot reply in the same conversation that month is free, because the meter only counts each conversation once.
Examples:
- A customer chats with Fynn, then gets handed to an agent. The agent uses Suggest reply twice and Summarize once. That is 1 AI conversation.
- A customer emails in and the agent answers manually with no Copilot actions. That is 0 AI conversations.
- An agent translates one incoming message. That is 1 AI conversation, if it is the first AI action on that thread this month.
Plan limits and overage prices
| Plan | Included / month | Overage | Top-up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hacker (free) | 10 | none | Not available, upgrade to add more |
| Startup | 100 | $0.07 per conversation | Yes |
| Business | 200 | $0.05 per conversation | Yes |
| Enterprise | 500 | $0.03 per conversation | Yes |
Prepaid balance
Paid plans buy a prepaid balance, and overage conversations debit from it. Top up under Settings → Billing in the AI Conversations Usage block. Stripe handles the payment, and the balance is credited once Stripe confirms the charge.
Auto-recharge
Auto-recharge keeps AI conversations running without manual intervention. You configure it in the same Billing block:
- Recharge amount: how much we top up at once (default $10).
- Max per month: a safety cap so a runaway integration cannot drain your card (default 5 recharges).
- Threshold: the balance level that triggers a recharge. It is set in whole dollars, with a minimum and default of $1.
When your balance drops below the threshold, auto-recharge tops it back up by the recharge amount, up to the monthly cap. With auto-recharge off, AI actions pause once the balance runs out until you top up manually.
The dashboard banner
A banner across the top of the dashboard surfaces billing state changes:
- Approaching your limit: a yellow heads-up as you near the included quota. The wording depends on whether you have usable prepaid balance and whether auto-recharge is on, so it spells out what happens after the quota runs out.
- Quota reached: amber, showing the overage price per conversation for your plan.
- Balance low: orange as overage debits push your balance toward the threshold. It switches to a calmer blue banner when auto-recharge is on, since you will not actually be interrupted.
- Balance below threshold: the final state. Red if auto-recharge is off, so AI conversations pause until you top up. Blue if auto-recharge is on, since the recharge is already queued.
You can dismiss any banner with the close button on the right, and the dismissal sticks across reloads. Once the underlying condition clears (a recharge lands, you upgrade, or the billing cycle resets), the dismissal resets so the next occurrence shows again.
Bring your own API key (BYOK)
Startup and above can attach their own OpenAI or Anthropic key under Settings → Bots. When the live chat bot runs on your own key, those conversations do not count toward the AI conversations included with your plan, and you pay your provider directly at their rates.
BYOK applies only to the live chat bot. Agent-side Copilot actions always run on Deskwoot-managed AI, so a conversation an agent runs Copilot on still counts toward your monthly quota, even if the bot side was on your own key.
On Enterprise the live chat bot is Deskwoot-managed by default (powered by Claude, no key required), and those bot conversations count toward the 500 included. You can switch to BYOK on Enterprise too if you want bot conversations that do not count toward the meter.