Documentation

Credits & billing

This is the page to read before you spend anything. It has the exact formula, worked examples you can play with, what happens at renewal, and every limit that can stop a request — including the ones that aren't about your plan.

What a credit is

One credit is 35 characters of message content, rounded up per message, minimum one. A short Discord message is one credit. A 200-character one is six.

It is measured in characters rather than per message because servers differ enormously. Across real usage, servers sit anywhere between about 46 and 165 characters per message — a 3.6× spread that stays stable within any one server. Charging a flat rate per message would permanently overcharge terse communities to subsidise wordy ones.

Credits are the only unit you will ever see

Not a display layer over dollars — the actual meter. Every limit, every warning, every refusal, and every receipt is in credits. You will never be shown a token count or a provider price, because neither is something you can act on.

What a summary costs

The whole formula is one line:

the messages it read, times the quality multiplier
— never fewer than that quality's minimum

Quality	Credits per message	Minimum charge	In credits
Cheap	0.75×	50 messages	38
Fast	1×	100 messages	100
Balanced	2×	150 messages	300
Deep	4×	200 messages	800

Said another way: a Deep message costs four messages of your allowance, and no summary counts as fewer than 200. That is the entire pricing model — you can work out any request before you run it.

Why there is a minimum at all

An AI model's output is roughly the same size no matter how little it read. Summarizing 5 messages costs nearly as much to produce as summarizing 200. Without a floor, tiny summaries would be by far the most expensive thing per credit — and the cheapest way to drain a plan.

So the floor exists to make small requests honest, not to squeeze you. In practice it only binds on very short catch-ups; anything over 200 messages is charged for exactly what it read.

Detail is free. Quality is not.

Choosing Detailed over Brief costs nothing extra, because writing more about what it found is nearly free. Choosing Deep over Fast genuinely costs four times as much. Turn detail up freely; think before turning quality up.

Worked examples

Move the slider. This runs the same arithmetic the bot does, so these are the numbers you will actually be charged.

A summary of400 messages

105,000 — the largest any plan allows

Quality	Costs	Times a month on Pro
Cheap	300	583×
Fast	400	437×
Balanced	800	218×
Deep	1,600	109×

Balanced needs Pro and Deep needs Scale, so not every row is available on every plan. The last column assumes you spend the whole 175,000 allowance on this one summary size.

Three that come up often:

Situation	Quality	Cost
A morning catch-up on one busy channel — about 400 messages	Fast	400 credits
A quick skim of 60 messages	Cheap	45 credits
A careful read of a 2,000-message week	Balanced	4,000 credits

For scale: Pro's 175,000 monthly credits is about 437 of that first one.

Everything that spends credits

Every feature that calls a model spends the server's credits, and every one reports what it spent.There is no feature that quietly meters itself somewhere you can't see.

/catchup, and every recast button under it — a recast is a new request.
/ask, and the Ask button on a summary.
The @mention agent. Its cost can't be predicted in advance because it decides how many tools to use, so it is billed from measured usage after each reply, at the same conversion. Expect roughly 60–190 credits a reply today.
Every scheduled run, every live update, and every welcome DM.

Things that cost nothing: /settings, /usage, /setup, /privacy, /preset list, /debug, and a live channel that has gone quiet.

/usage shows the plan, credits used, credits left, and when they renew. /debug explains what the last summary spent and why. Both are open to everyone.

Big requests ask first

Any request estimated above 3,000 credits asks you first. You see the number and choose. Nobody should ever discover the price of a large request by being billed for it.

Underneath, the order is always the same:

1. Estimate: Built from the exact text that will be sent. No provider call happens without one.
2. Reserve: The pessimistic figure is held against the balance, so two people running big summaries at once can't both be told there's room.
3. Run: The actual work.
4. Settle: Charged against measured usage, and the difference returned. You pay for what happened, not what was predicted.

If a request fails upstream, the reservation is released. A failed summary does not cost you credits.

Warnings arrive at 70%, 90%, and 100% of the monthly allowance, so running out is never a surprise. Automatic runs use a standing cap instead of a prompt — see Schedules, live & welcomes.

What each plan includes

Every server starts with 3,000 credits, once — not per month. Paid plans are guild subscriptions: they cover the whole server, not one person.

	Free trial	Starter	Pro	Scale
Price	Free	$5/mo	$15/mo	$39/mo
Credits	3,000 once	50,000/mo	175,000/mo	500,000/mo
Messages per request	300	2,000	3,000	5,000
Quality	Cheap, Fast	Cheap, Fast	Cheap, Fast, Balanced	Cheap, Fast, Balanced, Deep
Detail	Standard	Brief, Standard	Brief, Standard, Detailed	Brief, Standard, Detailed, Exhaustive
Server-wide	—	—	Yes	Yes
/ask and @mention	3 total	Included	Included	Included
Schedules	—	1, channel only	5, server-wide	25, server-wide
Live channels	—	—	1	5
Welcome summaries	—	—	25/day	100/day
Presets and custom prompts	—	—	Yes	Yes
Top-ups and own API key	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

The trial gives you 300 messages per request on Cheap and Fast, which is enough to judge whether the summaries are any good. It does not include schedules, live channels, or presets, because those are the things that recur.

Subscriptions are bought and managed inside Discord — see below. The full side-by-side is on the pricing page.

How billing and renewal work

Summary Bot is a Discord Premium App. Discord — not us — handles payment, tax, receipts, renewals, cancellation, and refunds. That is Discord policy for paid apps, and it means your card details never touch anything of ours.

Renewal: Subscriptions renew on the billing period Discord shows you, until cancelled.
Your credits reset: When the period advances, the monthly allowance refills. Unused monthly credits do not roll over — but purchased top-up credits are untouched.
Cancelling: Cancel in Discord at any time. It takes effect at the end of the current period, so you keep what you paid for. Discord asks you to cancel from the same device type you subscribed on.
Removing the bot: Removing the bot from your server does not cancel the subscription. Cancel it in Discord separately.
Refunds: Handled by Discord under their refund policy. One-time purchases — that is, top-ups — are generally non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise. Subscription refund requests within five days of a purchase or renewal may be considered case by case. Discord's current policy is what actually applies.
Changing plan: Feature access follows the entitlement Discord reports. When it changes, the bot picks it up automatically — there is nothing to redeem or activate.

Downgrading is not retroactive, but it is immediate

If a server drops from Pro to Starter, features above the new plan stop working right away — server-wide catch-ups, Balanced quality, presets, live channels. Existing schedules beyond the new limit stop and tell you so rather than failing quietly every morning.

Top-ups add fuel, never features

Top-ups are one-time credit packs for a month that ran long.

Pack	Credits	Credits per dollar
$5	40,000	8,000
$15	150,000	10,000
$40	400,000	10,000

They never expire.
They are spent after the monthly allowance, so you always use the credits you already paid for that month first.
Every pack is deliberately worse value than a subscription at the same price. If you find yourself buying them regularly, upgrading is cheaper and we would rather say so.

A top-up you bought is not applied automatically

A one-time purchase belongs to you, the buyer, until you choose which server it goes to — you might be in several. After buying, run /usage in the server you want it in, and apply it there. Until you do, the credits are held safely against your Discord account, not lost.

Credits are fuel. A plan is entitlement.

Buying credits never unlocks a feature. A Starter server holding a million credits still cannot run Deep quality, server-wide catch-ups, presets, or a live channel. It can run Starter's features for a very long time — that is all a pack ever does.

If what you want is a capability rather than more of the same, the upgrade is the thing to buy, not the pack.

Safeguards you might meet

A few limits exist that aren't about your plan. They are worth knowing so they aren't alarming if you meet one.

Per-member daily capSB-CREDIT-429: One member can spend at most a fifth of the monthly allowance in a day, so a single person — or a compromised account — can't empty a shared balance. It resets daily and affects only that member.
One at a timeSB-BUSY-409: You can have one summary running at a time. They queue badly, so the bot asks you to wait a few seconds instead.
Global daily stopSB-QUOTA-431: The bot has its own daily provider ceiling across every server. If it's hit, credit- funded requests pause until midnight UTC. Your balance is untouched, and a personal API key still works.

Plan	Monthly credits	One member, per day
Free trial	3,000 once	3,000
Starter	50,000	10,000
Pro	175,000	35,000
Scale	500,000	100,000

Every one of these is announced with a code and a fix when you hit it. All of them are listed in Troubleshooting.

Using your own API key

You can save your own OpenAI or Anthropic key with /setapikey. It is used only after the server's credits are gone — an overage valve, not a way in.

Plan credits are always spent first. A saved key changes nothing until they run out.
Usage on your key is billed by that provider, to you, at their rates. Summary Bot takes no cut and cannot see your provider bill.
for_server:true shares the key with everyone in the server and needs Manage Server. Without it, the key is yours alone.
Keys are stored encrypted. Remove one at any time with /removeapikey.
A key never unlocks anything. Quality tiers, server-wide scope, presets, schedules, and live channels are all plan entitlements. A key with unlimited funds still cannot run Deep on Starter.

Most people never need this. It exists for servers that occasionally blow past a plan and would rather pay a provider directly than upgrade — and for the sake of not holding anyone hostage.

If something here doesn't match what you were charged, say so in the support server with the trace id from the message. Billing questions get a real answer.