What you are charged for
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.
Things that are not billed: teammates, agents, knowledge sources, phone numbers you have not received calls on, the browser voice demo, and every message a human on your team writes. Testing your own agent in the test chat costs the same as a customer message, which is a fair trade for finding a bad answer before a customer does.
The cap, and why the default is wrong for you
The cap 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 figure 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. One that gets close every month is a decision waiting to be made.
What happens at the cap
The billable channels stop answering. They stop politely — the customer is not left staring at a dead bubble — 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%, which is the last point at which raising the cap 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 is metered through Stripe: set it up once and usage is forwarded as it accrues, 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 volume rates is based on.