A: Hi Tom, good questions, and your math is off by more than you'd think.

1) A credit is charged when the AI thinks, not per message. If a contact fires off 5 quick messages, the bot waits for them to finish and answers once, and that is one charge even if the reply comes out as 3 bubbles.

More importantly, 1 credit per reply is not the rate you would be on. AppSumo accounts run on our own in-house models: Max at 0.25 credits per action, which is the most accurate model we ship, and Mini, the lighter model in the same family at 0.15, which is rolling out now. Mini is a touch more prone to small mistakes, which is the trade for the price. So the 20 reply conversation you describe is 5 credits on Max and 3 on Mini, not 20. That is 50 cents, or 30. And if you bring your own Anthropic key, AI replies cost you 0 credits and you pay Anthropic directly.

The extras are what actually move the number: a booking, a web search or a custom function is charged as its own action at the same rate, and so are background jobs like auto-tagging or capturing a name and email when they actually do something. Reading your FAQs and understanding images and documents is free. Voice notes and video audio are the exception, at 1 credit each to transcribe.

Over the last 30 days, across tens of thousands of live conversations on the platform, the median conversation used 2 credits and 9 out of 10 came in at 8 or under. At 10 cents a credit that is around 20 cents for a typical conversation, not $2.

Worth being clear about: the credits included with a tier are a one time starting balance (100 on Plan 1, 300 / 500 / 750 / 1500 / 3000 as you go up), not a monthly refill. After that you top up at 10 cents a credit, or run on your own key.

2) Nothing rude gets sent to your contact. The AI simply goes quiet in that one chat. You get an email and a notification saying the bot deactivated on that contact, and the chat itself is marked, so you can step in and answer yourself. To let the AI carry on, you turn the AI back on for that contact and reset its message counter, both sitting in the chat side panel. The cap goes 20 on Plan 1, 50 on Plan 2, 100 on Plan 3, unlimited from Plan 4 up, and you can set a lower one yourself per agent if you'd rather a human takes over early.

p.s. that is exactly what the product does. Our help centre feeds the AI, and the same bot answers our own support chat, so questions like yours get answered automatically once they're documented. Yours just found a few gaps in ours, which I'm fixing today.

Sohaib