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Getting Started · 5 min read

How Credits Work

What credits are, what spends them, where to watch your balance, and how they relate to your plan.

Research costs something to run. Searches get made, pages get fetched, models do work. LumaVista meters all of it in a single unit — credits — so that you can see what you are spending without needing to think about tokens, providers, or per-model pricing.

This page covers what spends credits, where to see it, and how credits relate to your plan. For current prices and what each plan includes, see Pricing — that page is the source of truth for the numbers, and this one deliberately does not repeat them.

One unit for everything

Every priced operation in LumaVista is denominated in credits. Not in euros, not in tokens, not in “compute units” that vary by feature.

This is a deliberate simplification. Underneath, a deep research run touches several models from several providers at several prices, plus search and crawling. Exposing that would give you an itemised bill you could not act on. A single unit means the number you see before you press the button is comparable to the number you saw last time.

What spends credits

Your usage breaks down by surface:

SurfaceWhat is being paid for
ResearchThe whole run — planning, searching, crawling, embedding, reasoning, synthesis. Also report regeneration and any diagrams generated for that report.
ChatConversation turns, including any retrieval or tool use they trigger.
VoiceSpeech in and speech out.
RecordingsTranscription, including speaker separation.
DocumentsPremium document conversion for the higher-quality PDF pipeline.

Two things that do not spend credits, and are worth knowing because people assume they do:

  • Reading what you already have. Opening a report, browsing your knowledge graph, searching your own documents, re-reading a chat — none of that costs anything. You pay when work is done, not when you look at the result.
  • Standard document conversion. The default conversion path is included. Only the premium pipeline, for documents where layout and table fidelity matter, is metered — and if it fails, it falls back to the standard path rather than charging you for a failure.

Storage is tracked separately from credits, against an allowance that comes with your plan.

Seeing what you spent

Open Usage from the sidebar. It shows:

  • Your balance — what you have, what you have used, what your plan included.
  • Where your credits went — the breakdown by surface, so you can see whether your spend is research, chat, or transcription.
  • Expiry — credits are dated, and this shows which batches expire when.
  • Usage over time — a chart, for spotting the week something changed.
  • Storage — how much of your allowance you are using.

You can also see spend at the level of an individual research run, and per node inside its graph. If a project cost more than you expected, the graph will show you which branch did it.

Knowing before you spend

LumaVista tells you the cost before an expensive operation, not after.

  • Generating a report shows the credit cost in the dialog, and it changes as you adjust the output form, depth, and focus — so you can see what the choice costs while you are making it.
  • Post-report enhancements like diagram generation show an estimate before they run.
  • Research runs carry a budget, and when a run reaches it the system asks whether to extend rather than quietly continuing to spend. See Human-in-the-Loop.

The estimate is an estimate. A run that discovers the topic is deeper than it looked can cost more than predicted — which is exactly why the budget check exists rather than a silent overrun.

Credits and your plan

Paid plans include a monthly credit allowance that refreshes with your billing period. If you need more than your plan includes, you can buy credit packs at any time; larger packs carry a bonus. Purchased credits expire a year after purchase.

You can also turn on auto-refill, which tops you up automatically when your balance runs low — useful if you have scheduled automations that would otherwise stall mid-run at three in the morning.

Included allowance is used before purchased credits, so a pack you bought is not consumed while you still have monthly allowance left.

Full plan comparison, allowances, and pack sizes are on the Pricing page.

Running out

If you run out of credits, work that would spend them stops. It does not silently degrade to a worse model or produce a truncated report and present it as finished — that would be worse than stopping, because you would not know.

Everything that does not cost credits keeps working: your reports, notes, documents, and knowledge graph stay fully available to read, search, and export. Running out of credits pauses new work; it does not lock you out of what you already own.