Usage
What the spend screen shows, why it is percentages rather than counters, and when it starts again.
Users do not see a ledger. They see /dashboard/usage, which answers one question well: how much of this
window have I used, and what happens when it runs out.
What the screen shows
| Part | What it means |
|---|---|
| This week | What has been spent in the current window, as a proportion |
| This month | The same over a longer view, for people who plan further ahead |
| The one step up | The next plan, offered at the moment it becomes the cheaper answer |
Percentages rather than counts, deliberately. A count of turns is not a measure of spend, because a turn on a heavy model costs many times what a turn on a light one does. A percentage is honest about the thing that runs out.
Where the allowance comes from
The rule is that a plan's allowance follows from its price, and the shipped proportion is sixty percent of the price in credits. The window is weekly, resetting on Monday at 00:00 UTC. What is not used does not roll over, which is what makes the weekly number a budget rather than a balance.
Both halves of that are the owner's to change:
- The price of a plan, in
Money → Plans & pricing. - The allowance rule itself, in
Money → Credits, which also holds the per-account ceiling.
Why a heavy model runs out faster
Every turn reserves credits against itself when it starts and settles when it finishes. A heavy model reserves
more, so a week of heavy models is used up in days while a week of light ones may end with something left.
Insight → Overview in the panel is the same story from the owner's side, and Insight → Analytics shows
whether people are being refused by a limit rather than by an outage.
Rate limits, which are a different thing
A rate limit is not about credits. It is a ceiling on how fast somebody may ask, decided per plan in
Platform → Rate limits & abuse, and the shipped fallback for a plan with nothing set is ten turns a minute
and a hundred and twenty an hour.
| Symptom | Which limit it is |
|---|---|
| Refused immediately, repeatedly | A rate limit, in turns per minute |
| Refused after a busy stretch | A rate limit, in turns per hour |
| Refused while the week is not done | A per-account ceiling, or the installation's own |
| Nothing is refused and usage is high | Neither. That is simply a busy account |
A refusal message names the window and the wait, which is the difference between a support ticket and a shrug.
The one step up
The upgrade suggestion appears at the moment it is the cheaper answer rather than on a fixed day: an account that
is consistently spending its whole window is being told about the plan above it, in the place where it is
already looking at the number. Which plan is offered and what it costs is Money → Plans & pricing, and the
featured one is the one the pricing page points at.
A ceiling of zero is a legitimate setting
An owner who wants to stop an account using credits without deleting it can
set its ceiling to zero in Money → Credits, either for a while or
permanently. The account keeps working, and turns are refused with a reason.