Plans & Pricing

Most questions about Invent pricing come down to two things:

1. If my assistant handles X messages a day, how much will that cost me?
2. What do I get for the $29/month plan?

This page answers both, then explains how the pricing model works underneath.

​

How Much Will It Cost Me?

The fastest way to get a real number for your business is the AI Assistant Cost Calculator on our pricing page. Enter your daily message volume, pick a model, and your monthly spend updates live on the graph.

​

What to Expect at Each Volume

On the Auto model (the recommended default that picks a model per message), here is what a typical business pays each month. Most setups land close to these numbers: For a live number tied to today’s rates and your exact configuration, use the calculator.

​

What Changes the Cost

Two assistants at the same volume can land in different places. The main factors:

• Model choice. Lighter models (Nano tiers, smaller Gemini/GPT variants) can be up to 10× cheaper per message than premium reasoning models. Auto balances quality and cost and is the right default for most businesses.
• Media & document processing. Voice notes, images, and PDFs take more tokens to understand. If your customers send rich media, turn the toggle on in the calculator.
• Conversation length. Longer back-and-forth uses more tokens per message. Prompt caching softens this significantly after the first message.
• Knowledge & actions. Each Knowledge Base search and each action run adds a small amount on top of the message. For most businesses this is a few cents a day.

​

What Do I Get for $29/Month?

The Business plan is $29/month. Here is what that actually includes:

• $29 of usage included each month. Spent the same way as Pay As You Go usage, at the same per-message rates. Roughly $29 worth of messages, knowledge searches, and broadcasts before any extra billing kicks in.
• Premium features unlocked. Custom domain, white-label branding (“Remove Powered by”), audit logs, sub-organizations, Slack support, larger knowledge storage, and more.
• Usage above $29 is billed at the same rate as Pay As You Go. You are never charged a premium for going over, you just pay for what you use.

If your monthly usage is around $29 or less and you want the Business-only features (custom domain, whitelabel, audit logs, sub-orgs), the Business plan pays for itself. If you expect to spend more, you still want Business for the feature set, but understand that the $29 is your baseline, not a cap.

​

The Three Plans at a Glance

Every plan uses the same per-message, per-search, per-broadcast rates. The only thing that changes is what’s included and which features are unlocked.

​

Knowledge & Broadcasts: Pocket-Change Costs

Both are billed from the same balance as messages. They rarely move the needle compared to the message cost.

​

Knowledge

• Upload: about $0.0005 per chunk (a chunk is ~350–400 words, about half a page). A 10-page document runs around $0.007 to index. A full 100-page help center is around $0.07. One-time charge.
• Search: about $0.0005 per search. Identical searches are cached free for 2 hours across your whole organization, so repeat questions don’t re-charge.

A business handling 1,000 customer questions a month typically spends around $0.50 on knowledge searches on top of message costs.

​

Broadcasts

Send campaigns via Email, SMS, or WhatsApp. You bring your own provider (Twilio, Meta, SendGrid, etc.) and Invent charges a small per-message fee on top. Your provider bills their own delivery cost separately (Meta template fees, Twilio SMS, etc.).

​

How Message Pricing Works

This section is the “why” behind the numbers above. Skip it if the calculator and the cost ranges already answered your question.

​

Per-Message Pricing, Not Subscriptions

Invent is usage-based. You pay for what you use, measured per message. Every model in the assistant settings shows its estimated cost per message right next to its name (for example, Auto ≈ $0.004). That figure already assumes an average conversation with prompt caching enabled.

​

What Affects a Single Message’s Cost

• The model. Premium models cost more per message than lighter ones. The calculator shows each model’s per-message rate.
• Response length. Longer, more detailed replies use more output tokens.
• Instruction length. Every message carries your full instructions as context, so bloated instructions compound. Keep them focused. See Instructions vs Knowledge for what belongs where.
• Actions triggered. Messages that include a Knowledge Base Search or a tool call use extra tokens. Invent has optimized this significantly (see below).

​

Prompt Caching

Enabled on every supported model. When your assistant handles multiple messages in the same conversation, cached context is reused instead of reprocessed. This means:

• First message: slightly more expensive, the full context is processed fresh.
• Consecutive messages: cheaper than the per-message figure, cached context is read at a reduced rate.

Caches live for up to one hour with the AI provider. A conversation that goes idle longer may rebuild its cache on the next message. In the Playground, each message shows a token breakdown with a “Cache read” line so you can see exactly how much caching is saving you.

​

Cost Optimizations

Invent continuously tunes how messages are handled:

• Actions up to ~50% cheaper. Messages involving actions (Knowledge Base Search, integrations) use far fewer tokens than a naive implementation would.
• Assistants use up to ~50% fewer tokens overall, thanks to internal context-management improvements.
• Knowledge Base Searches use up to ~20% fewer tokens, so retrieving information is more efficient.

​

Playground Discount

Messages sent in the Playground get a discount so you can iterate on instructions, knowledge, and actions without worrying about costs. The token breakdown in the Playground makes the discount explicit.

​

Credits, Under the Hood

You pay Invent in dollars, not credits. Internally the system converts your spend to a “credit” unit so that every usage type (messages, knowledge searches, broadcasts) draws from the same balance. You never need to think about credits unless you want to. The dashboard and invoices show dollar amounts. What you should know:

• Pay As You Go: 100 free messages per month. The first allowance lands when your organization is created; after that a new one is granted once a month, as soon as your balance has run out (see the FAQ). Unused free messages do not roll over.
• Business: $29 in included usage per month, same rate card as Pay As You Go. Anything above is billed at the same rates.
• Free usage is one organization per account. If you run multiple organizations, only one receives the free monthly allocation.

​

Billing Management

All billing lives at Settings → Billing.

​

Monthly Spending Limit

Cap how much your organization can spend per calendar month. When the limit is reached, billable operations pause until you raise the limit or the month rolls over: the counter resets on the 1st of each month.

1. Go to Settings → Billing
2. Click Set Spending Limit. The limit is on right away, at $30 or at the amount you last removed
3. Click Edit, enter an amount between $1 and $100,000, then click Save changes

The page then shows a progress bar of your current spend against the limit. Edit changes the amount at any time. Remove asks you to confirm, then turns the limit off.

​

Limits per Member and Assistant

The monthly limit caps everyone together. To cap one person or one assistant, open Settings → Spending limits (billing managers only, also linked from the Billing page right under the monthly limit). The page shows the organization limit at the top, then a Members card and an Assistants card. Each row shows what it spent this month, with the biggest spender first.

• Members: what each member spends in their own chats.
• Assistants: what each assistant spends replying to customers.

The first row of each card, All members or All assistants, is the default: every row without its own limit follows it, wears a Default tag, and offers Set own limit. Click Set limit on that first row to set the default, Edit to change it. A row with its own limit shows Edit and a remove button; removing an own limit puts the row back on the default. Limits are per head, not pooled. Every counter resets on the 1st of each month, and a limit set mid-month counts what was already spent this month. When a limit is reached:

• A member’s new messages are rejected with You reached your spending limit for this month. Ask a billing manager to raise it. A billing manager reads it with a Manage spending limits button instead.
• An assistant stops replying to customers until you raise its limit or the month resets.
• Billing managers get an email, at most once every 24 hours per limit.

You can also set an assistant’s limit from its Settings tab, in the Spending limit section at the bottom.

​

Auto-Recharge

Keep your assistant running by automatically topping up when your balance dips below a threshold.

1. Go to Settings → Billing
2. Click Edit next to auto-recharge
3. Set your minimum balance threshold (default: $5) and recharge amount (default: $10). Both accept values from $5 to $500
4. Save

​

Usage Tracking

Watch your spend at Settings → Usage. It is for billing managers, and the same view also sits under Analytics → Usage:

• Four headline numbers: Current usage for the selected period, Per day (the average across the period), Biggest cost (the kind of usage you paid the most for, with its share) and Estimated usage (what this calendar month will cost at the rate so far)
• Spend by type: a stacked graph over time with a total per kind of usage
• Spend by model: the same split by AI model
• Spend by member and Spend by assistant: who the AI spend went to
• Budget: your available balance with the auto-recharge status, and how much of the spending limit is used
• Date range filter: presets from the last 24 hours out to the last three years, plus year to date and a custom range

For the breakdown by event type and the resource ceilings your plan applies, see Usage & Limits.

​

Add Credits

Top up your balance by hand from Settings → Billing:

1. Click Add Credits under your balance
2. Pick $10, $25, $50 or $100, or enter a custom amount between $5 and $500
3. Click Add $X in credits. The amount is charged right away to the payment method on file

A payment method has to be on file first; the dialog asks you to add one if there is none. Credits never expire and are not refundable.

​

Billing Details

Under Billing details on the same page, click Edit details to open the Stripe customer portal and set the company name, address and VAT number shown on your invoices.

​

Billing History & Payment Methods

View past payments, download receipts, and update your card under Settings → Billing. Each card payment in Payment History has a Receipt button that opens its Stripe invoice, with your billing details on it. Payments are processed via Stripe and all major credit cards are accepted.

​

Upgrading and Downgrading

Both happen at Settings → Plans. Upgrade to Business. The button under Business depends on where your organization stands:

• Start free trial: you have never subscribed before and have no card on file. Stripe Checkout opens and the first 7 days are free.
• Subscribe: you subscribed before and have no card on file. Stripe Checkout opens.
• Upgrade to Business: a payment method is already on file. Stripe Checkout opens, and the 7-day trial still applies if you never subscribed before.
• Manage Plan: shown once you are on Business. It opens the Stripe billing portal.

Downgrade to Pay As You Go. Click Downgrade under Pay As You Go. It opens the same Stripe billing portal, where you cancel the subscription. Business stays on until the end date shown on the Billing page, next to a Keep Business button that opens the portal again so you can undo it. Cancelling has a few side effects:

• Auto-recharge switches off the moment you request the cancellation. Your card stays on file and you can turn auto-recharge back on from Billing.
• When Business ends, any remaining included usage is cleared and you lose the Business-only features. Your data stays.
• Custom domains keep working for 5 more days, then show an unavailable page until you subscribe again. Your domain setup is kept.
• When Business ends, members with billing permissions get an email. If you have custom domains, it names the day they stop working.

​

FAQ

​

Fair Usage

Invent reserves the right to limit accounts showing abusive patterns or excessive usage that impacts service quality for everyone else.