How Ciela bills you.

What it pays for: every prospect you import from Apollo through Ciela's lead-sourcing tools costs real money to Apollo. Each successful lookup deducts one credit from your balance. We pay Apollo, you pay us a flat allowance per month with no per-lead surprises.

When it resets: first day of your billing month, balance refills to your tier's allowance. Unused credits don't roll over.

When you run out: the lead sourcing tool refuses to launch a new batch until next reset or until you upgrade. No overage billing on lead credits, they're atomic, you spend the credit before the lookup, so there's nothing to reconcile after.

What it pays for: time a prospect spends talking to a Theo demo through the web call widget. Vapi bills us for the underlying voice infrastructure (Twilio for transport, ElevenLabs for synthesis, the LLM that powers the conversation). We pass that through as a monthly minute bundle, and each call rounds up to the next whole minute, so a 30-second demo still counts as one.

When it resets: monthly with your billing cycle, same as lead credits.

Topup packs: when the bundle runs low you can buy a top-up pack from Settings → Usage. Top-up minutes drain BEFORE overage so you only hit overage if both your bundle and your top-up are empty.

Overage: calls past your bundle plus topup bill at $0.20 / min, hard-capped at $50 / day. The cap is a safety net so a runaway demo pool can never surprise you with a quadruple-digit bill overnight.

What it pays for: every AI call we make on your behalf, not just Ciela chat. Seven distinct surfaces all draw from this one bucket, the model varies by surface so credits-per-call does too. A quick Ciela Q&A is often ~100–150 credits; drafting a campaign with tools is often ~800–1,500 credits per turn. Theo demo replies cost much less because they run on a cheaper model.

Monthly bucket by tier: credits refill on a rolling 30-day window, not at midnight on the 1st, so a fresh subscriber on the 15th doesn't feel a cliff at the start of the next calendar month. Stay under the bucket, every surface above is free as part of your subscription.

Per-surface breakdown: Settings → Usage shows a "Where this month's credits went" panel under the main meter. Each surface gets its own row with credits spent and percentage of the month's total, sorted by spend. Rows with zero spend hide so a fresh slate stays clean. The panel answers "did Theo demos eat my bucket or did the email writer?" without you having to dig through invoices.

Top up credits: when you run out you can buy a top-up pack from Settings → Usage. Top-up credits drain after your tier bucket is spent and never expire. Packs come in 10k / 40k / 100k credit sizes at $5 / $20 / $50.

Bring your own key: if you'd rather pay Anthropic directly, paste your own API key in Settings → AI Keys. BYOK is Studio and higher, and it is entirely optional. The email writer, the preview included, already runs on the platform key against your monthly credit bucket by default, so you never need a key of your own for it to work, bringing one just moves that spend off your bucket and onto your provider. Two BYOK paths run independently. The Ciela toggle on that tab routes Ciela chat, inbox drafts, and Agency client summaries to your Anthropic key. The provider selector higher up the tab controls the email writer and LinkedIn writer, set it to Anthropic and they bill to your key too. Theo voice and demo chat stay on the platform bucket because Vapi runs that LLM call from its own infrastructure using Vapi's Anthropic credential, your key never enters the chain.

Email failover (opt-in): BYOK is great until your own provider key hits a hard quota or billing wall mid-campaign. By default that pauses the email campaign with a fix-it banner so you can top up and resume, and nothing touches your credit bucket. If you'd rather the campaign keep moving, flip on the email failover toggle in Settings → AI Keys: when your key runs dry, Ciela retries that email on the platform key so single-channel email through Eli and your Atlas flows keep sending. Those retried emails draw from your tier's monthly AI credit bucket at the platform rate (you'll see them in the usage breakdown). It only triggers on a genuine quota or billing wall, never on a brief rate-limit blip, and it's off until you turn it on so you're never silently charged platform credits.

Settings → Usage shows live balances and the topup CTAs for all three buckets. The minute meter on the same page tracks voice consumption against your monthly bundle plus any top-up minutes.

Settings → Billing is where you manage everything in the app, no Stripe portal: upgrade or downgrade your plan, update the card on file, and cancel. Upgrades apply right away with a prorated charge; downgrades and cancellation also take effect immediately, with no credit for unused time. Stripe still emails your invoices and receipts.