Billing & credits

About 7 minutesNo code neededUpdated July 2026

After this page, you'll know how to pick a plan, buy extra credits when you run low, and read exactly where every credit went — all from one billing page.

Everything in Qalyb runs on credits. Your plan gives you a monthly pool of included credits, and every billable action — a minute of voice, a chat reply, a Studio API call — draws it down. When you need more, you buy a one-time credit pack. The conversion is simple: 1 credit costs about $0.01, so 100 credits is roughly $1.

Before you start, make sure you have:

An admin role — members can view billing but not change it

A card ready for checkout, if you plan to upgrade or top up (payments go through Stripe)

Who can change billing:

admins can change plans, open the Stripe portal, and buy credits. Members see a read-only view with the banner "You have read-only access to billing." — they can check the plan and usage but can't make changes.

Find your billing page

Open Account → Billing from the sidebar (the /billing page). The top of the page shows four cards — Current plan, Credit balance, 30-day call time, and your Renews date — followed by two tabs:

Billing — the plan picker (Free, Starter, Pro, Ultra) with a Monthly/Yearly toggle and a "Compare all plans" table.
Top-up & usage — one-time credit packs plus your usage breakdown, API activity, and the credit ledger.

Your balance refreshes on its own every 30 seconds, and there's a Refresh button if you want an immediate update right after a purchase.

Qalyb billing page showing four metric cards above the plan picker with Monthly and Yearly toggle and the four plan cards — The billing page: current plan, credit balance, and 30-day call time, with the plan picker below.

Pick a plan

Each plan card lists exactly what it includes — channels, deployed agents, knowledge size, team members, and features — read live from the plan catalog, so what you see is what you get. Pro carries the "Most popular" flag.

Plan	Price	Included credits / mo	What you get
Free	$0	100 (~8 voice min)	Playground only — no deployed agents, no channels. 14-day retention. Carries the "Powered by Qalyb" badge.
Starter	$29 / mo · $290 / yr	1,000 (~83 min)	3 agents, 1 deployed, 2 members. Email + Telegram + WhatsApp (coming soon) channels (max 2). Insights, 10MB knowledge, 1 voice clone, 30-day retention.
Pro (Most popular)	$99 / mo · $990 / yr	7,500 (~625 min)	10 agents, 3 deployed. All channels incl. SIP (Messenger & Instagram coming soon). Campaigns, webhooks, API keys, custom branding/domain, exports, post-call analysis, reports, priority support. 20MB knowledge, 5 clones, 90-day retention. No badge.
Ultra	$499 / mo · $4,990 / yr	50,000 (~4,166 min)	50 agents, 10 deployed. Everything in Pro at higher limits. 40MB knowledge, 20 clones, 365-day retention.
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	SSO, dedicated deployment, and unlimited limits. Not in the public picker — it appears as a "Contact sales" strip (`sales@qalyb.ai`).

Open the Billing tab

On the billing page, stay on the default Billing tab.

Pick monthly or yearly

Toggle Monthly or Yearly. Yearly is billed annually and shows a "2 months free" badge — you get roughly two months free.

Choose a plan card

Select Free, Starter, Pro, or Ultra.

Click Upgrade and pay

You're taken to Stripe Checkout. After payment, your new plan and its included credits appear back in Qalyb.

Compare if you're unsure

Scroll to Compare all plans to see every limit side by side, or click Contact sales for Enterprise.

Switching plans later:

admins can open the Stripe customer portal from the billing page to change or cancel a subscription. Cancelling puts the workspace back on Free. New workspaces always start on Free.

If buttons are disabled:

if card payments aren't set up on your workspace, an amber banner reads "Stripe is not configured yet." and all actions are disabled. A single plan or pack may show "Price unavailable" if its Stripe price isn't set up — contact your administrator.

Top up with credit packs

Running low between renewals? Switch to the Top-up & usage tab and buy a one-time credit pack through Stripe Checkout. Packs stack on top of your plan's included credits.

Pack	Price	Credits
Small	$50	5,000
Team	$250	27,500
Scale	$1,000	120,000

Credit packs expire:

purchased credits expire 12 months after purchase. Credits are granted when Stripe confirms the payment, not the instant you click — so a top-up can take a few seconds to show up in Recent activity.

See where your credits go

The Top-up & usage tab is also where you audit spending. It has three sections:

Usage (last 30 days / current month) — credits spent and event counts, broken down by type: voice minutes, chat messages, knowledge queries, web searches, and Studio API usage.
API category — for Studio API users, a table of requests, audio time, input characters, and tokens over the last 30 days.
Recent activity — the credit ledger: a permanent, chronological list of every credit change (Stripe payments, plan renewals, and usage) with the reason, direction (credit or debit), amount, and date.

Top-up and usage tab showing credit pack cards, a usage-by-type breakdown, and the recent activity credit ledger table — The Top-up & usage tab: buy credit packs, then review usage and the credit ledger.

What each action costs

Every billable action has a fixed credit price:

Usage type	Credits	Notes
Voice — `voice.minute`	12 / min	Billed by delivered seconds, recorded when the call completes.
Chat — `chat.message`	1 / message	One credit per assistant reply.
Knowledge lookup — `kb.query`	0.5 / query	Each knowledge-base lookup.
Web search — `web.search`	1.0 / search	Each web search an agent runs.
Studio text-to-speech — `api.tts_char`	0.003 / char	Per character of generated speech.
Studio speech-to-text — `api.stt_second`	0.05 / sec	Per second of transcribed audio.
Studio LLM tokens — `api.llm_token1k`	0.6 / 1k tokens	Per thousand tokens.
API request — `api.request`	0	API requests are free by default.

Each usage event is recorded exactly once and taken from your non-expired credits. Credits burn down in a fixed order — lowest priority, soonest to expire, oldest first — so credits about to lapse are spent before fresh ones.

A billing hiccup never breaks a call:

metering is designed to fail open. If the billing system can't read your balance for any reason, the call or chat still goes through — you're never locked out of your own service by an internal error.

When you hit a limit

Two kinds of gates protect each plan. Plan limits stop you creating more than your plan allows — extra agents, members, channels, voice clones, integrations per agent, or knowledge beyond your size cap. When you hit one, the action is blocked with an "Upgrade your plan" message (a 403 for developers). Some menu items (Insights, Reports) are simply hidden on plans that don't include them.

Credit balance limits apply to hard-limit plans — today that is only Free. When a Free workspace runs out of credits, widget voice shows an upgrade prompt (an HTTP 402 for developers) and widget chat gracefully degrades. Paid plans (Starter, Pro, Ultra) are soft-limit — they keep working, and any overage is logged for review rather than blocked.

Free is playground-only:

on Free, deployed agents are capped at 0 (max_deployed_agents), so you can build and test in the playground but can't connect a channel, widget, phone number, or share link until you upgrade. The message reads "Your plan is playground-only."

For developers

The dashboard covers everything most teams need, but the same actions are available over the API. Reading the summary requires billing:read; checkout requires billing:write (admins only).

Fetch the full billing summary — plan, balance, plan catalog, usage, and ledger:

curl · bash

curl https://api.qalyb.ai/billing \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk-live-..."

Start a subscription checkout (returns a Stripe Checkout URL):

curl · bash

curl -X POST https://api.qalyb.ai/billing/checkout/subscription \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk-live-..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "planKey": "pro",
    "interval": "month"
  }'

Buy a one-time credit pack:

curl · bash

curl -X POST https://api.qalyb.ai/billing/checkout/credits \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk-live-..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "packKey": "team"
  }'

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