Usage & AI Credits

Understand how AI credits work, what actions consume them, and how to monitor your usage.

What Are AI Credits?

AI credits are the currency that powers all AI-driven features in The Reply Agent. Every plan comes with a monthly AI credit budget measured in USD. As you use AI-powered features — like searching for prospects, generating emails, or training your AI sales rep — credits are consumed from your budget.

Your credit budget resets at the start of each billing period. On the Free plan, credits are cumulative and do not reset.

AI Credit Budgets by Plan

Tip: If you're consistently hitting your credit limit before the end of your billing cycle, consider upgrading to a higher plan for a larger budget.

What Uses AI Credits?

There are several categories of AI credit usage. The major categories are tracked in the usage dashboard, and additional intelligence-related costs are recorded in the background.

1. People Search

When it happens: Every time you run a persona search to discover new prospects.

When you search for people matching your ideal customer persona, the AI works behind the scenes to:

• Analyze your search query — The AI interprets your natural-language description and qualifiers to understand exactly who you're looking for.
• Find and evaluate prospects — The AI scans and processes results from across the web, evaluating whether each person matches your criteria.
• Qualify and rank results — Each potential match is scored and filtered so you only see relevant, high-quality prospects.
• Find email addresses — For qualifying prospects, the system locates verified professional email addresses.

What affects the cost:

• The complexity of your search criteria
• The number of results found and processed
• How many email addresses are looked up

People search is typically the largest credit consumer since it involves the most AI processing per action.

2. Email Generation

When it happens: When campaigns create personalized cold outreach emails for your recipients.

When you add prospects to a campaign, the AI generates unique, personalized emails for each recipient. This includes:

• Analyzing the recipient's profile — The AI reviews what it knows about each person to craft a relevant message.
• Writing personalized copy — Each email is uniquely generated based on the recipient's background, company, and your campaign's purpose.
• Applying your campaign settings — The AI follows your campaign's tone, length, and messaging guidelines.
• Generating follow-up sequences — If your campaign includes follow-up emails, each one is generated individually.

What affects the cost:

• The number of recipients in your campaign
• How many emails are in your sequence (initial + follow-ups)
• The length and complexity of each generated email

3. Reply Generation

When it happens: When your AI sales rep automatically responds to incoming emails.

When prospects reply to your outreach emails, your AI sales rep can handle the conversation autonomously. Each AI-generated reply consumes credits because the AI must:

• Read and understand the incoming message — The AI processes the prospect's reply to determine intent and sentiment.
• Access its knowledge base — The AI references the training and knowledge you've provided to give accurate, relevant responses.
• Craft an appropriate response — The AI writes a reply that matches your brand voice and moves the conversation forward.
• Consider conversation history — The AI reviews the full thread to maintain context and coherence.

What affects the cost:

• The number of replies your AI sales rep handles
• The length and complexity of conversations
• How much context (thread history) needs to be processed

4. Agent Training

When it happens: When you set up or update your AI sales rep's knowledge base and personality.

Training your AI sales rep involves the AI processing and synthesizing information about your business. This includes:

• Processing Q&A answers — When you answer questions during agent setup, the AI processes your responses to build understanding.
• Generating follow-up questions — The AI creates intelligent follow-up questions to deepen its knowledge of your business.
• Creating knowledge summaries — The AI synthesizes all your training data into a comprehensive knowledge base.
• Updating knowledge — When you refine or update your agent's knowledge using natural language, the AI reprocesses and integrates the changes.

What affects the cost:

• How many training questions you answer
• The length and detail of your responses
• How often you update or refine the knowledge base

5. Reply Analysis

When it happens: When the system analyzes incoming campaign replies to extract insights.

Every reply is automatically classified across 9 dimensions (sentiment, intent, interest level, objections, questions, topics, what worked, what didn't, and a summary). This analysis runs in the background whenever a new reply is detected.

What affects the cost:

• The number of replies received across all campaigns
• The length and complexity of replies

Additional Background Costs

The following AI operations also consume credits. They run automatically in the background as part of the intelligence system and are included in your overall usage total:

• Call Analysis -- analyzing call transcripts from Google Meet (sentiment, buying signals, competitive mentions, key moments, and more)
• Insights Synthesis -- the agentic AI pipeline that produces qualitative market intelligence reports from your reply and call data
• Agent Suggestions -- generating AI-powered field suggestions for your sales reps based on market intelligence
• Persona Suggestions -- computing per-persona market learnings and generating persona refinement suggestions
• Company Suggestions -- generating company-level strategic direction suggestions from aggregated intelligence

These costs are typically small relative to people search and email generation, and they scale with how much data your campaigns produce.

How to Monitor Your Usage

You can track your AI credit usage in real time from Settings > Usage.

Usage Meter

The usage meter shows your current spending against your plan's credit budget as a visual progress bar:

• Green — You're well within your budget
• Yellow — You're approaching your limit (80%+)
• Red — You've reached or exceeded your limit

It also includes a daily usage chart that breaks down your credit consumption over time, helping you spot trends and plan ahead.

Usage Costs Table

The detailed costs table lets you see every individual AI action and its credit cost. You can filter by category:

• Search -- People search costs
• Email Generation -- Campaign email generation costs
• Reply Generation -- AI sales rep reply costs
• Reply Analysis -- Incoming reply classification costs
• Agent Training -- AI agent setup and training costs

What Happens When You Hit Your Limit?

When your AI credit budget is fully consumed:

• People searches will be blocked until your budget resets or you upgrade.
• Campaigns that are actively generating emails may be affected.
• AI replies to incoming emails may be affected.

Your billing period resets your credit budget automatically, or you can upgrade your plan at any time for an immediate increase.

Tips for Managing Credits Efficiently

• Refine your search criteria — More specific persona searches tend to be more cost-efficient because the AI processes fewer irrelevant results.
• Train your agent once, thoroughly — Investing time in a comprehensive initial training session is more cost-effective than making many small updates.
• Monitor your daily usage — Check the Usage tab regularly to understand your consumption patterns.
• Upgrade proactively — If you see yourself consistently reaching 80%+ of your budget, upgrading before you hit the limit ensures uninterrupted service.

Next Steps

• Set up your AI Sales Reps to handle replies automatically
• Configure Campaigns for cold outreach
• Read about Insights to understand how intelligence works
• See Calendar & Calls for call transcript analysis