Usage Credits

Usage credit is the balance that pays for VibeView-provided AI test runs and streaming overage (time beyond your plan’s included minutes). It is one balance, measured in US dollars (USD) and shown with the $ symbol throughout the product. This page explains how it works: your monthly allowance, prepaid top-ups, how AI runs and streaming overage are billed, how Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) bypasses credit entirely, and what happens when your balance runs out.

One balance, two things it pays for

Usage credit is spent on:

• VibeView-provided AI test runs — deducted per run at VibeView’s billed rate.
• Streaming overage — deducted per minute once a session goes past your plan’s included streaming minutes (see Billing for the plan matrix).

There is no separate “minutes” balance and no second ledger — both draw from the same usage credit, and both show up in your cost history. Cloud builds (beta) work the same way: builds beyond your plan’s free monthly allowance draw from usage credit and appear in the cost history labeled “Cloud build”.

Your balance is made up of two buckets:

• Monthly allowance — credit included with your plan, refilled each billing cycle.
• Prepaid credit — credit you buy via top-up, which never expires.

Occasionally VibeView support may grant credit to your organization (for example, as a courtesy) — granted credit is added to your balance and behaves like the bucket it is granted to, most commonly prepaid credit.

You can see both buckets, your per-run cost history, and your refill date in the Credits panel under Settings.

Your monthly allowance

Every plan includes a monthly usage credit allowance:

Need a larger allowance than Professional includes? Contact us at support@vibeview.io for custom terms.

• Your allowance refills on your billing cycle and is set back to your plan’s amount at the start of each cycle.
• Unused allowance does not carry over. As the Credits panel notes: “Unused monthly allowance doesn’t carry over — it resets to your plan amount each billing cycle. Prepaid credit never expires.”
• Free tier refills automatically every calendar month — even though Free has no billing cycle or subscription, its $1 allowance is topped back up to $1 at the start of each calendar month, the same as a paid plan’s cycle reset.
• If your subscription lapses (past due or canceled), your allowance drops to the Free amount ($1) until the subscription is active again.

Your credit is spent at VibeView’s per-run or per-minute rate — you don’t need to track token prices, model costs, or streaming infrastructure costs yourself.

Prepaid top-ups

When you need more credit than your monthly allowance provides, you can buy prepaid credit at any time.

• Fixed bundles: $10 / $25 / $50.
• Custom amount: any value from $5 to $500.
• How to buy: open the Credits panel under Settings, choose a bundle or enter a custom amount, and complete the one-time Stripe Checkout (in USD). Once the payment is confirmed, your prepaid balance is credited. Buying top-ups requires an organization admin role.

Prepaid credit never expires. By default, topping up is a manual choice — nothing is ever charged automatically unless your organization turns on automatic top-up.

Spending order: your monthly allowance is spent first; prepaid credit is used only after the allowance for the cycle is exhausted. This applies to both AI runs and streaming overage. A single run or a session that crosses the boundary splits correctly across both buckets.

Automatic top-up

Automatic top-up keeps runs going without anyone having to buy usage credit by hand. When your organization’s usage credit drops to a balance you choose, we charge your saved payment method to bring it back up to a target you also choose.

Automatic top-up watches your combined usage credit — monthly allowance plus prepaid credit added together — and fires once that total drops to the balance you choose as the trigger.

Setting it up

Automatic top-up requires the organization admin role and a payment method on file. Open the Credits panel under Settings and find the Automatic top-up card.

If you don’t have a payment method saved yet, the card shows an Add payment method button — add a card there and come back.

Turn on Enable automatic top-up. Three amounts appear, pre-filled with suggested starting values that you’re free to change:

• When balance drops to ($) — the balance that triggers a top-up. Starts at $5.
• Top up to ($) — the balance we bring you back to. Starts at $15, and must be at least $5 more than the trigger amount.
• Auto-charge limit ($ per month) — the most automatic top-up will charge in a calendar month. Starts at $60, and must be large enough to fund at least one top-up — that is, at least your Top up to amount minus your trigger amount. A limit larger than that simply buys more top-ups per month: with a $70 trigger, a $100 target and a $60 limit, each top-up costs $30, so two fit in a month.

A No monthly limit switch sits below these fields. Turn it on and the Auto-charge limit field is no longer used: VibeView will charge your saved card as often as needed to keep your balance topped up, with no monthly ceiling on those charges.

Save your settings and automatic top-up is armed. You can change any of these amounts, or turn automatic top-up off, at any time — turning it off never requires a payment method on file or any amount to be set.

If your balance is already at or below the trigger you chose, you are due for a top-up the moment you save — so saving charges your card straight away. Rather than letting that happen unannounced, a Top up now? confirmation appears first, showing your current balance and the amount you’re topping up to. Cancel it and nothing is saved and nothing is charged.

Once enabled, both the Automatic top-up card on the Credits panel and the Usage page show how much has been charged automatically so far this month against your limit, so you can keep an eye on it without waiting for a notification.

The monthly limit

The monthly limit (when set) counts only automatic charges. Credit you buy yourself is never limited by it and doesn’t count against it — manual purchases are never blocked by the limit, whether it’s set to an amount or switched off with No monthly limit.

Once the limit is reached, automatic top-ups stop for the rest of the month and your organization’s admins are notified. Nothing else about your balance changes — you can always buy usage credit directly, raise the limit, or switch on No monthly limit to resume automatic top-up right away.

The limit resets at the start of each calendar month. Raising it takes effect immediately — if you’ve used all of a $40 limit and raise it to $60, $20 becomes available again right away. Lowering it below what’s already been used just means no more automatic top-ups run until the next reset.

Every automatic charge is at least $5, so the last few dollars of a limit can go unused: with $59 of a $60 limit charged, the remaining $1 is too small to top up with, and the limit counts as reached. The spend meter says so when this happens, rather than showing runway you can’t spend. We won’t round a charge up to use it — that would charge you more than the Top up to amount you chose. Raise the limit if you want those top-ups to continue.

If a payment fails

If your card is declined or expired, or your bank needs to confirm the payment, we pause automatic top-up and notify your organization’s admins by email and in the product. Your automatic top-up settings are left exactly as you set them.

Update your payment method from the Credits panel under Settings, and automatic top-up picks back up on its own — there’s nothing else to switch back on.

If your saved payment method is removed entirely while automatic top-up is switched on, automatic top-up simply has nothing to charge — nothing breaks, and it starts working again on its own as soon as a payment method is back on file.

In one rare case, we may abandon a top-up attempt without being able to confirm whether it went through, rather than risk charging you twice. If this happens, we’ll let you know — and, in the unlikely event the charge did go through anyway, check your billing history to confirm. Saving your automatic top-up settings again resumes automatic top-up in this case.

Just as rarely, a charge may go through without the usage credit reaching your balance. We pause automatic top-up if that happens, so the same shortfall can’t be charged again while it’s unresolved, and tell your admins. If the credit turns up on its own shortly afterwards, the pause lifts by itself and automatic top-up carries on. Otherwise email support@vibeview.io and we’ll apply the credit to your account — unlike the cases above, updating your card or re-saving your settings won’t clear this one, so we don’t offer that as a fix.

How AI runs are billed

• For VibeView-provided runs, the Cost is the usage credit actually deducted from your balance for that run — the real billed amount, not a token estimate. It is always shown in USD.
• Small runs use adaptive precision, so a genuine sub-cent charge (for example, $0.0028) is shown at that precision rather than rounding to $0.00.
• For BYOK runs, VibeView deducts nothing — no credit is used. The Cost is instead shown as an estimate (~$X (est.)), computed from public list pricing so you can gauge spend; your own provider bills you directly and the exact amount may differ. Estimated (BYOK) and actual (provided) costs are always kept separate, never blended into one number.

You can review per-run cost history in the Credits panel, and aggregate usage (VibeView-billed vs BYOK, and a per-model breakdown) under Settings → AI Configuration.

How streaming overage is billed

Every plan includes a set number of streaming minutes per month (see the plan matrix in Billing). Once a session’s total month-to-date streaming time — across your whole organization — passes the included amount (plus any bonus minutes your organization has been granted), further streaming time is billed to usage credit at $0.06 per whole minute.

• Overage is metered continuously while sessions are active, in whole-minute increments — there’s no need to end a session for it to be billed.
• Overage draws from the same usage credit as AI runs, allowance-first then prepaid.
• Organizations can turn overage off entirely in Settings → Session Defaults. With overage disabled, streaming stops hard at the included (+ bonus) minutes for the month instead of drawing on credit — see What happens at zero balance below.
• A superadmin can grant your organization bonus included minutes for the current month (for example, as a one-time courtesy) — bonus minutes are consumed after your plan’s included minutes and before overage, and reset at the start of the next month.

Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)

BYOK lets you run AI tests using your own provider account instead of VibeView-provided AI.

• Connect an Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or OpenRouter key.
• BYOK runs bypass credit entirely: no balance check, no deduction. Your provider bills you directly for the tokens used.
• BYOK works on every plan, including Free — it is always available as an alternative to spending credit.
• BYOK only affects AI run billing. Streaming overage is unaffected by BYOK and always bills to usage credit the same way.

See AI Configuration for how to add and manage your keys.

What happens at zero balance

For AI runs:

• At the start of a run: the provided run is blocked before it starts with the message “Out of usage credit — top up or add your own API key.”
• Your options are to top up, switch to BYOK, or wait for the next billing cycle’s allowance refill.
• If credit runs out mid-run: the run is never cut off in the middle of an LLM call — it finishes its current work and stops cleanly between calls. Its status becomes “Out of credit” and any partial results are preserved. Worst case, a single extra LLM call may complete before the run stops.

For streaming overage:

• While a session is billing overage, if usage credit runs low, you get a warning notice so the cutoff is never a surprise.
• If the balance is exhausted (or an organization admin has disabled overage in Settings → Session Defaults), active sessions past the included minutes get a 60-second warning, then the session ends automatically.
• Starting a new session past included minutes is only allowed if overage is enabled for your organization and your balance can cover a few minutes of overage; otherwise the session is blocked at creation with a message pointing you at topping up or upgrading.

When VibeView-provided AI is unavailable (not a credit problem)

Sometimes a provided run is blocked for a reason that has nothing to do with your balance. In these cases, buying credit will not help — the message will tell you to add your own API key instead. There are five possible run-start block messages:

Only the last message is a credit problem. The others are all “pick another model / add your own key” states — so if you see one of the first three, topping up won’t unblock the run. Switch to BYOK (or wait for provided AI to become available again).

FAQ

• Does unused monthly allowance roll over? No. It resets to your plan’s amount at the start of each billing cycle (or, for Free, each calendar month).
• Does prepaid credit expire? No. Prepaid credit never expires.
• Will I be charged automatically when I run out? Only if your organization has turned on automatic top-up. Otherwise, no — you top up manually or switch to BYOK.
• Does automatic top-up affect my monthly allowance? No. It only ever adds prepaid credit — your monthly allowance amount and refill schedule are unaffected. Your allowance is still always spent before purchased credit (see spending order above).
• Which bucket is spent first? Your monthly allowance, then prepaid credit — for both AI runs and streaming overage.
• Do BYOK runs cost credit? No. BYOK runs bypass credit entirely — VibeView deducts nothing; your provider bills you directly. VibeView shows an estimated cost (~$X (est.)) for reference only. Streaming overage still bills to credit regardless of BYOK.
• Does streaming overage use a different balance than AI runs? No. It’s the same usage credit, same allowance-then-prepaid order.
• Can I turn off streaming overage? Yes, organization admins can disable it in Settings → Session Defaults. Sessions then hard-stop at included (+ bonus) minutes instead of drawing on credit.