Seats and licences

Your workspace has one subscription, for a number of people you chose when you upgraded. That number is how many people may be in the workspace, counting pending invitations. Nothing you do in the app changes what you pay: inviting, removing and leaving only use or free the places you already pay for. You change the number yourself, on the Billing page: pick the new number with − and +, press Continue, and Autumn's page shows the exact prorated charge or credit and takes it from the card on file once you confirm.

This page explains how that works. It deliberately does not quote prices or plan limits, which change; the billing screen shows what your workspace pays today.

One subscription, a number of people

• Upgrading asks how many people you want to pay for (yourself included): press Upgrade to Pro, pick the number with − and + while the price is written out, then Continue to payment. The provider holds the card, the invoices and the number.
• Inviting someone takes one of those places from the moment the invitation is sent, so two invitations cannot be promised the same place. Nothing is charged.
• Removing someone, or someone leaving, frees their place for the next invitation. Your bill does not change.
• Changing the number is done on the Billing page: press Change on the Plan card, pick the new number with − and +, then Continue to payment. The payment page shows the prorated difference, up or down, and charges or credits your card once you confirm. It cannot go below the people already in the workspace, counting invitations not yet accepted.

Nothing is ever bought behind your back. The bill changes only when you change the number yourself.

Why an invitation is cancelled

On the free plan — Free is for one person trying Alchex, so any invitation is cancelled within a few seconds of being sent — move to Pro from Settings → Billing. Only the workspace owner can use a free workspace. If one already has other people in it — invited while it was on a paid plan, say — they stay members, but they cannot get in: they see a page saying the workspace is on the free plan and that the owner can move it to Pro. Nothing of theirs is removed, and they are back in the moment the workspace upgrades. Your billing page tells you how many people that is.

On Pro — when your members and pending invitations already fill every place you pay for, the invitation is cancelled within a few seconds of being sent, and shows as Revoked on the Members screen once you reload it. Revoking an unaccepted invitation frees a place at no cost; paying for more people is done on the Billing page.

When a partner provides your plan — your partner bought a fixed number of places for the year, and the same rule applies to them.

When the payment provider cannot be reached for a moment, invitations pause with a message saying so, and work again shortly.

Removing someone

Removing a member ends their access at once, and frees their place. It never touches billing: if the payment provider cannot be reached, the person is still removed. If you want to pay for fewer people afterwards, lower the number on the Billing page.

Tool calls

Each time Alchex reads from, or acts in, one of your connected systems on your behalf, that is a tool call. Tool calls cost nothing: they draw no credit and are not counted. Every connection goes through the app's own connector service, which Alchex does not pay per call.

Connections are not licensed

One thing your plan deliberately does not meter: how many of your own systems you connect.

On a paid plan there is no limit — connect every system your evidence actually lives in. Metering that would make Alchex worse at the one job it has, and the cost a connection really drives is your AI usage, which is already accounted for against your allowance.

The free plan includes a small number of connections. That is a boundary on the trial, not a per-system charge: it is enough to point Alchex at the systems you want to judge it on. If you reach it, the refusal names the number you have and offers the upgrade; disconnecting a system you are not using frees a slot immediately.

Two behaviours worth knowing at the free limit:

• Reconnecting a system you already have is never refused. An expired token, changed permissions or a switched account re-runs the same connection rather than adding one, so being at your limit never blocks you from repairing something you already connected.
• An abandoned connection costs you nothing. Closing the provider's consent window part-way leaves no claim behind — a slot is never silently held by a connection you did not finish.

How the AI allowance meters

Your plan's AI allowance is spent by the work Alchex's assistant actually does — generating a document, auditing, chatting. Four things worth knowing about how that figure is kept:

• You are charged what a piece of work really cost, after it runs. There is no flat per-call fee: a short chat turn costs a fraction of a long document audit, and the meter reflects that. The allowance is kept in one place — our billing provider — so the meter in the chat, the billing page, the 80% warning and the point where work is refused all read the same figure.
• The check happens before each piece of work starts, and it holds the money. A workspace with allowance remaining is admitted; one at its cap is refused with a message saying so. The amount a piece of work might cost is set aside the moment it is admitted, so two pieces of work starting at the same instant cannot both spend the last of your allowance. Whatever is not used is returned as soon as the work finishes, and you are charged only what it really cost. Your spend therefore stops at your cap rather than drifting a little past it. If the billing provider is briefly unreachable, work is let through rather than stopped, and it is still charged to your allowance once it finishes.
• Different work runs on different models, and you are charged each one's own rate. Alchex does not use a single model for everything — a quick internal check and a long piece of drafting are not the same job, and they do not cost the same. What lands on your meter is what the model that did the work actually charges, so lighter work shows up as lighter spend rather than being rounded up to the price of the heaviest thing we run.
• Repeated context is charged at a lower rate, and that is most of the saving. Work that revisits the same material — the same framework, the same document, a long conversation — does not pay full price to re-read it each time. Re-read context is charged at a small fraction of fresh material, and in practice it is the large majority of what a busy workspace consumes. This is why a long working session moves the meter far less than its length suggests, and why the second question about a document costs much less than the first.
• The count is checked every day. Once a day, what our billing provider charged each workspace for AI is compared with what the AI actually cost us, and any gap raises an alarm on our side — so work that slipped past the meter, or a charge higher than the work cost, is found and fixed rather than left to grow.
• A new period starts a new window. When your allowance renews, the meter returns to zero; the billing page shows the date it next refills.

Pro carries one credit balance and one storage limit for the workspace, the credit renewed each period, and you can add credit without changing plan. A higher plan is never given less than the one beneath it: whatever a plan below includes, yours includes at least as much, and anything agreed on top of that is added rather than substituted. The free plan is the one exception by design: it carries no AI credit, so the assistant's work starts once the workspace moves to Pro.

Capacity: one credit balance for the workspace

AI draws from one credit balance that belongs to the workspace: on Pro, a monthly credit refill, shared by everyone in it and the same whether you pay for two people or ten. Pro adds 20 credits every month. The balance is always counted in credits, never in money: one credit buys a dollar of AI at the model's own cost. The billing page shows the balance as one figure, such as "15 credits left", and one bar; what each run used is shown in credits too.

One thing does not scale at all. How much automation you run is not limited: no plan counts or caps workflow runs. What an automation does still counts where it always did — the AI it uses draws on the credit; the calls it makes to your connected systems cost nothing.

Adding credit

When the balance runs low, an owner or admin presses Add credit on the Credit card and picks an amount to pay; each option says what it buys, for example "$50 → 25 credits" (every $2 paid adds one credit). Bought credits sit on top of the monthly refill and never expires; the refill keeps arriving every month as before. Nothing is charged on the click alone: the button opens our payment provider's page, which shows exactly what you will pay and asks you to confirm, charging the card on file (or taking a first card).

Top up automatically does the same without the click. When it is on and the balance falls under 10 credits, the payment provider adds 25 credits (charged as $50 to your card on file) — the switch reads "Adds 25 credits when under 10 credits" — up to a monthly limit you choose ($100, $250, $500 or $1,000). It is off until you turn it on, it needs a card on file, and every reload is an invoice with a receipt. If a reload fails — a declined card, the monthly limit reached — the owners and admins are told, and the billing page says so under the switch. If the balance drains unusually fast (three reloads inside an hour), Alchex switches automatic reload off and tells you, so a fault costs one reload rather than a month's limit.

If your card is declined, the payment provider's page says so and lets you pay with another card; nothing is added and nothing is charged until a payment goes through.

Upgrade on a free workspace goes straight to payment for the paid plan; there is nothing else to choose.

Storage is not sold, and does not need to be. The workspace's storage allowance and it pools across your workspace, so the allowance grows as your team does. For the documents this product holds — policies, evidence, attachments — that allowance is far larger than a team will use, which is why there is nothing to buy.

If the payment provider already holds a card for your workspace, an upgrade can complete without a payment page at all. You are then taken straight back to the billing screen, which shows your new plan.

When storage runs out

Storage is counted across everything your workspace keeps: uploaded and external documents, document assets, evidence, register attachments, chat attachments and datasets. When an upload would take you past your limit it is refused before the file is stored, with a message saying so — you are never charged for something that was not kept, and a refused upload leaves your usage unchanged.

Deleting files gives the space back.

If your workspace does somehow approach its limit, the answer is not a bigger bill: clear what you no longer need.

Paying monthly or yearly

Choosing yearly billing changes how often you are invoiced, not how the product meters. A yearly subscription is billed once a year at a discounted rate, and your credit still refills monthly — the same monthly amount a monthly subscriber gets, refreshed on the same cadence. The billing screen shows when your credit next refills (monthly) and your yearly price. Bought credit is a one-time purchase on either cadence.

When a partner provides your plan

If you bought Alchex through a partner, your partner pays for your plan and sends you a link to open your workspace. Sign in with the email address your partner used, and your year starts when you open the link. If you do not have a workspace yet, you create one on the way and the link brings you back.

The workspace is yours: your documents, members and settings belong to your organisation, not to the partner. The billing screen shows that your plan is provided by your partner, how many seats it includes, and the date it ends. It does not renew by itself. Your partner buys each further year, so talk to them about renewals and prices. There is no billing portal for you to manage, because you are not the one being invoiced.

A partner link can only be applied by an owner or admin of the workspace, and not to a workspace that already pays for its own plan, since that would pay for the same seats twice.

Reading the numbers

The billing screen is two cards:

• Plan — Free (just you), or Pro and how many people it covers, with what you pay and the date of the next payment. Change (or Upgrade to Pro) opens a small window to pick the number of people; Manage payment holds the card, invoices and cancelling.
• Credit — how many credits are left, a bar, and "20 credits added every month". Add credit opens a small window to pick an amount; Top up automatically is the switch underneath. If the balance cannot be read, no figure is shown.

Every window ends in Continue to payment, and the payment page shows the exact amount before anything is charged.

You are also told when you pass 80% of your monthly credit: every owner and admin gets one notice, once per month, so the first sign is not work being refused. See Your inbox.

Two honesty notes about what you are looking at:

• The payment provider is the authority on what you are being billed. Alchex keeps a copy of your plan so screens load quickly, and it catches up moments after any change. Where the two could disagree — how many people you pay for — the invitation check asks the provider, never the copy.
• A number Alchex cannot verify is not guessed. If entitlements cannot be read at that moment, the screen says so rather than showing a plausible figure, and actions that depend on it are refused rather than allowed optimistically. The credit figure follows the same rule: where it cannot be read, nothing is shown rather than a figure that claims you have used none of it.

Practical guidance

• Consider giving approval authority to a second person. With one approver, every review is self-approved: the requests still work — you name yourself and decide them — but nobody else ever reads the change before it publishes. A second place is what buys you that second pair of eyes.
• Audit pending invitations before paying for more. An invitation nobody accepted is holding a place.
• Lower the number when the team shrinks. Removing someone frees a place but keeps the bill; if you do not need the place, lower the number on the Billing page.

Next

• Members and invitations — sending and revoking access.
• Roles and permissions — what a licence actually buys someone.