Usage Credits and the Ask Pool

Most of ScatterSpoke is not metered. Static Surveys and their responses are unlimited on every tier, including Free, and are deliberately kept out of the billing meters entirely. Two things are scarce enough to count, because each one costs real model time every time it runs:

• Agent Surveys — creating a survey the AI conducts
• Ask Queries — a question submitted to Ask that reaches the AI-backed answer path

Everything on this page concerns those two meters and nothing else.

Two kinds of allowance

The confusing part of usage billing is that a workspace holds two allowances at once on the same meter, and they behave in opposite ways.

The included monthly allowance is granted per workspace and resets each calendar month. It is not multiplied by seat count — five seats and fifty seats draw on the same monthly figure. Unused allowance does not roll into next month; it simply resets.

Usage Credits are one-time and non-expiring. They belong to the workspace, survive plan changes, and roll over until spent. Some arrive as a grant at workspace creation; others are purchased.

	Included monthly allowance	Usage Credits
Granted by	The tier’s catalog entry	Signup grant or purchase
Resets	Every calendar month	Never — spent or nothing
Rolls over	No	Yes
Survives a plan change	Replaced by the new tier’s figure	Yes
Can be revoked	No	Only when unused, on refund of its purchase

The Ask Pool is what the Ask meter’s combined allowance is called: a shared workspace pool that everyone draws on, rather than a per-person quota that has to be assigned.

The order things are spent in

Consumption always tries the included allowance first, and only reaches for Usage Credits once that is exhausted. The Billing page phrases it the same way: purchased credits are used after monthly allowances run out.

That ordering matters more than it looks. It means buying credits early costs nothing — they sit untouched until the month’s included allowance is gone, and they are still there next month if it never is. There is no scenario where a purchase is quietly consumed ahead of allowance you have already paid for.

When both are empty, the request fails rather than silently proceeding: Ask reports a depleted pool, and Agent Survey creation reports depleted credits. Nothing is billed by surprise.

What each tier actually starts with

Free has no recurring allowance at all on either meter. Instead, every new workspace is granted one-time credits at creation: 10 Agent Surveys and 50 Ask Queries. Because they never expire, a Free workspace is not on a monthly clock — it has a fixed budget it can spend at whatever pace suits it.

That produces a genuine asymmetry in how Agent Surveys work by tier. On Free, Agent Survey creation is credit-backed: the feature gate reads 0 from the entitlement matrix, then checks the remaining credit balance and reports it as the limit, and each Agent Survey created spends one credit. On paid tiers, creation never touches credits — it draws on the tier’s monthly allowance, which is 20 on Pro, 150 on Business, and unlimited on Enterprise.

Ask follows the same monthly shape without the credit-backed exception: 0 on Free, 250 on Pro, 2,000 on Business, unlimited on Enterprise.

Buying more

Two purchases add Usage Credits, each granting non-expiring credits on its meter once the invoice is paid: the Agent survey pack grants 50 Agent Survey credits, and the Ask usage pack grants 250 Ask credits. Both are bought from the Seats card in Settings → Billing, in whatever multiple you want, and both are confirmed through the same review dialog as any other billing change. See Managing billing.

If a purchase is later refunded, only the unused portion of that grant is revoked. Credits already spent are not clawed back and the balance never goes negative — each purchase is tracked as its own grant precisely so a refund can be reversed cleanly.

Note

The usage meters in the Billing page fold both allowances into one number. The limit you see is usage so far this month, plus what remains of the monthly allowance, plus every unspent Usage Credit — so the ceiling visibly rises when you buy credits, rather than appearing as a second figure somewhere else.

Lapsed billing shrinks the pools

Both pools size themselves from Effective Tier, not from the purchased Plan Tier. A Business workspace whose billing has gone canceled, incomplete, or unpaid gets Free’s allowances — which is to say none, beyond whatever one-time credits it still holds.

Purchased Usage Credits are unaffected by this. They belong to the workspace and survive plan changes, so they remain spendable while the recurring allowance is gone. See Seats and capacity for how the fall back works and how it is undone.

The circuit breaker underneath

Behind the credit pools sits a daily LLM token budget scaled per tier — 1× the base on Free, 25× on Pro, 100× on Business, 500× on Enterprise. It is cost protection, not an allowance: in ordinary use the credit pools stop you long before it does. It exists so that a runaway loop, or an attempt to route around the credit pool, is still bounded. No tier is unlimited here, Enterprise included.

You should never encounter it. If you do, the interesting question is what is generating that volume, not how to raise the ceiling.