AI credits
Every AI feature in Teralo draws on one shared allowance, measured in credits, held by the organisation rather than by the person. This article is what a credit is, where the allowance comes from, and how to see what is left.
Credits are a fair-use quota rather than a bill. Nothing is charged per question, and there is no meter running against your card.
What a credit is
One credit is a thousand tokens, and a token is roughly three quarters of a word of everything involved in a turn: your question, the project data the assistant read to answer it, and the answer itself. Every call costs at least one credit, however short.
Two things follow, and they explain most of the variation people notice.
Reading costs more than writing. A question the assistant can answer from what it already has is cheap. A question that sends it to four tools and back is not, because each round carries the conversation so far.
Repeating yourself is cheap. Where the same material is sent again in a follow-up, it counts at a quarter weight, so a long conversation does not cost the same as its length suggests. A short follow-up in an existing chat is one of the cheapest things you can do.
The weekly allowance
The allowance is per organisation, per week, and it depends on your plan: an enterprise agreement carries a substantially larger one, a host organisation more than a guest organisation, and any organisation can be given a figure of its own. Your exact allowance, and how much of it is gone, are shown in the app (see below).
The week runs Monday to Monday, in UTC. There is no rollover: the allowance is a fresh amount each week rather than a balance that accumulates.
The daily ceiling
On top of the organisation's week, each person has a ceiling of 500 credits a day, resetting at midnight UTC.
That is not a second allowance, it is a guard: it stops one person's afternoon of experimenting from taking the whole team's week. In ordinary use nobody reaches it.
Whose credits a question spends
This is the part worth being precise about, because it is not what most people assume.
The organisation that owns the thing you are working on pays. Not the organisation you belong to.
So a subcontractor asking AI Chat a question inside a head contractor's project spends the head contractor's credits, because the project belongs to them. That same subcontractor's own allowance is spent only on their own organisation's surfaces: their own estimating, their own documents.
Two consequences. A host organisation's allowance covers the AI use of everybody on its jobs, which is why the allowance sits at organisation level in the first place. And a guest checking their own indicator is looking at their own organisation's figures, which are not the ones a question inside your project will spend. The app says so in as many words when it is showing you the other one.
What spends credits
Everything that calls the model, which is more than the chat window:
- AI Chat and the titles it generates for your conversations
- 3D model chat in the BIM viewer
- Document page read, the assistant reading pages of a drawing or specification
- Document autofill, filling a document's register fields from the file
- Report generation, the report builder's Describe your report
- Workflow builder AI, describing a workflow in words
- Editor AI assistant, the rewrite tool in rich text fields
- SDS extraction, Method statement extraction, Locations extraction, Direct cost extraction, Tender quote extraction, Estimating drawing autofill and Estimating quote extraction, all of which read an uploaded file so you do not have to type it in
- Organisation enrichment, the lookup when adding an organisation
The breakdown in the app is per feature, so a surprising week can be traced to the feature that caused it.
Two things deliberately cost nothing. Opening AI Chat is a database read, so the cards on the blank state are free. And an outside assistant connected over a connector does its own thinking on its own account, so it spends no Teralo credits at all, with one exception: asking it to read pages of a drawing runs Teralo's own page reader. See Connectors.
Seeing what is left
Two places, and they answer different questions.
The sparkles icon in the top bar is the full picture: how much of the week is used, when it resets, and a line per feature showing where it went. Hover or tap it to open. It appears on tablet and desktop widths.
The pill beside the send button in AI Chat, the BIM chat and the workflow builder appears once half the allowance is used, and says what is left at the moment of spending it. It is on every width, including a phone, which makes it the one to watch on site.
Both tint amber past 80 per cent and red at 100.
The pill has one deliberate silence: it hides rather than showing a figure when the number it holds is about a different organisation from the one your next question will charge. A wrong number at the moment of spending is worse than none.
When they run out
The last question is always allowed through. The next one is refused, with a message naming which limit you hit and when it lifts:
Your organisation has used all of its weekly AI credits. Credits reset on Monday 1 September.
or, for the personal ceiling:
You've reached your personal daily AI limit. It resets at midnight UTC.
Nothing else in Teralo stops. Every register, workflow, upload and approval works exactly as before; only the AI features pause.
If the check itself cannot run for some reason, the question is allowed through rather than blocked. Credit accounting is there to contain cost, and it is never allowed to be the thing that breaks a feature.
Spending fewer of them
- Ask a narrow question. "Which permits expire this week" reads one tool. "Give me a full project status" reads a dozen.
- Use a slash command where one fits. It tells the assistant which area to open, which saves it a round working that out.
- Follow up in the same conversation rather than starting a new one. Repeated material counts at a quarter weight, and a fresh chat starts from nothing.
- Give a page number when asking about a drawing. Reading pages is the one lookup with a cost of its own, so three targeted pages beat asking it to go hunting.
- Use Ask rather than Act when you only want an answer. It is a smaller request as well as a safer one.
Who can change the allowance
Nobody inside your organisation. The allowance follows your plan, and a different figure is set by Teralo against an agreement. If you are consistently running out, that is a conversation about the plan rather than a setting to find. See Plans and entitlements and Contacting support.