Pricing, credit and limits

Every business request in Slack is a priced, metered model call. Three things must all be in place: current pricing terms, funded credit, and room under the spend limits.

Pricing (HSAI only)

In HSAI Agent → Pricing, staff with the Admin role set two things. Customers never see either.

Selling margin: a gross margin up to 90% or a markup up to 1000%, over the pinned provider cost. Needs a reason.
Agent terms: switches priced usage on for a validity window of up to 366 days, in USD. Needs a reason and a current margin.

Both apply only to newly admitted calls. Calls already admitted keep the price they were admitted at. Disabled, expired or not-yet-valid terms refuse calls; they never fall back to cost. The agreed starting value in the billing contract is a 20% gross margin.

HSAI-funded credit

In HSAI-funded credit, one reviewed action can set the ceiling, approve and apply. Under Advanced these are separate:

Set the HSAI ceiling for this period. The most HSAI will fund. Adds no credit; customers cannot raise it.
Approve credit within that ceiling. Adds no balance.
Apply the approval. Adds it to the customer's balance once. The customer is not charged or invoiced.

A period must end within 366 days of its start. There is no automatic refill.

Customer allocation and limits

The customer administrator gives credit to people from the funded pool and can take back unused credit. They can also set an organisation limit, a default person limit and per-person limits. A limit of 0 stops new spending. Limits never add credit.

Staff can allocate or set limits on the customer's behalf from step 4, only when asked.

Holds

Before each model call, the worst-case cost at selling rates is held, then the unused part is released when usage comes back. The billing contract gives about USD 5.875 per held call before output at a 20% margin with the pinned bounds. A person whose available credit is below one hold is refused. Size pilot credit and person limits with this in mind.

What the customer sees when it fails

Cause	Slack reply
No allocation, balance used or held, limit reached or 0, period ended	"Your organisation has no agent credit available right now. Ask your HockeyStick administrator to give you credit."
No current agent terms	Refused as not enabled; the person is told to contact their administrator

Help never needs credit. Delivering a finished generation back to Slack makes no model call and needs no credit.

Pricing exceptions

If a settled call cannot be priced (for example usage over the admitted bound), it becomes an exception and both the user's and the organisation's allowance are blocked. Staff review each one with POST /api/admin/orgs/:orgId/assistant-billing/exceptions/:usageId/unblock and a note. An account unblocks only when every exception naming it is reviewed. The review never charges, refunds or releases the hold.

Stripe

Online collection through Stripe is disabled by default and needs STRIPE_BILLING_ENABLED=true plus full provider settings. Launch billing is finance-issued invoices prepared from usage reports. See Usage reports and audit.