What each plan includes
Free is $0 and needs no card: 500 replies or 50 voice minutes a month. Growth is $49 a month, or $39 a month billed yearly, with 3,000 replies or 300 voice minutes. Scale is $199 a month, or $159 a month billed yearly, with 15,000 replies or 1,500 voice minutes. Enterprise is volume rates on an annual contract, invoiced, and starts with a conversation with sales.
The plans do not differ in what the product can do. Voice, email, API actions, roles, the activity log and analytics are on Free exactly as they are on Scale. What changes is the usage included and the support: email support on Free and Growth, priority support and an onboarding call on Scale.
Plans are billed in advance, monthly or yearly. A yearly plan still hands out its usage a month at a time: the allowance resets on the first of each month, and whatever you did not use does not roll over.
One allowance for replies and minutes
An agent reply on chat or email is two cents. A voice minute is twenty cents, counted per started minute, so a call of two minutes and ten seconds bills as three. That is the same rounding your telephony provider uses, and it is what every estimate in the product assumes, so the number you see never comes in under the invoice.
Your plan's allowance is one pool that replies and minutes both draw on at those rates, so a voice minute uses as much of it as ten replies. Growth covers 3,000 replies, or 300 voice minutes, or any mix in between: 2,000 replies and 100 minutes uses exactly all of it.
Things that do not draw on it: people on your team, agents, knowledge sources, phone numbers you have not received calls on, the demo agent on the Talk page (it has its own ten minutes a day per account), and every message a person on your team writes. Testing your own agent does draw on it: a test chat reply counts the same as a customer's, and a browser voice test is billed per started minute like a phone call and will not start once the spend cap is reached. That is a fair trade for finding a bad answer before a customer does.
When Free runs out
With no card on file, the agent stops answering billable conversations once the Free allowance is used, and starts again when the month rolls over. Nothing past the allowance is ever billed, because there is nothing to bill it to.
Add a card and it keeps answering past the allowance at the list rates, up to your spend cap. If that happens most months, compare Growth: it costs $49 and includes $60 of usage at list rates, so once your usage past Free passes $49 in a month, Growth would have cost less.
The cap, and why the default is wrong for you
The spend cap limits what you pay beyond your plan's included usage; the plan itself is never counted against it. It starts at $50. That is a pilot number chosen so a misconfigured agent cannot run up a bill while you are still learning what the product does. It is not a production number, and leaving it there is the most common self-inflicted outage in a first busy month.
Set it to the overage your finance team would approve without a second conversation. Owners change it in Billing; nobody else can see it. Then look at it again at the end of a real month, against what you actually spent.
Watch month-to-date
The dashboard shows usage and an estimated cost for the month as it accrues.
Raise the cap deliberately
Billing → spend cap. Pick a number with a reason behind it rather than a round one.
Re-read it monthly
A cap that has never been near its limit is fine. If you are past your allowance every month, price the next plan up before you raise the cap again: its larger allowance often costs less than the overage.
What happens at the cap
When usage past your plan reaches the cap, the billable channels stop answering. They stop politely — the customer is not left staring at a dead widget — but they stop, because the alternative is spending money you did not agree to spend. Raising the cap starts them again immediately.
You get a notification at 80% of the cap, which is the last point at which raising it is a decision rather than a rescue, and another when the cap is reached. If those are going to the wrong person, fix that before you need them.
Invoices and payment
Billing runs through Stripe. The plan is charged in advance; usage past it is forwarded as it accrues and billed monthly in arrears, with invoices available from the billing page. The owner is the only role that can see or change any of this — an admin can run the agents all day without ever seeing a number.
At volume, the published rates stop being the interesting question and your own numbers start being it. Conversations, replies per conversation and voice minutes are all in the dashboard from the first week, and they are what a conversation about Enterprise volume rates is based on.