Credits & Budget Management

AEO Optima uses a three-layer credit system to manage API costs transparently. Credits flow from the platform through organizations to individual projects. On top of that, your plan's bundled allowances for metered features are free — and if you run out, pay-as-you-go lets you keep going instead of hitting a wall.

Credit Architecture

How Credits Flow

1. Platform Owner loads credits via OpenRouter (the LLM API gateway)
2. Platform Owner allocates a portion to each customer organization
3. Organization Admin distributes their org pool across projects as budgets
4. Snapshot captures deduct credits atomically as they consume API tokens
5. Budget advisor monitors actual usage and recommends rebalancing

Pay-As-You-Go (Overage)

Your plan includes a bundled allowance for the metered features — AI analyses, report generations, and GEO audits. Within that allowance they're free. When you exhaust it, you have two choices:

• Hit a hard stop (the default) — the feature is blocked until the allowance resets or you upgrade your plan.
• Enable pay-as-you-go — keep going by spending credits at a published per-unit rate, charged to your prepaid credit balance instead of blocking.

Rate card

Prices are shown live on Settings → Billing → Credits and are set by the platform; the app always quotes the current rate before anything is charged.

Pay-as-you-go is live for AI analyses, report generations, and GEO audits — enable it once and it applies across all three.

Capture credits — the two-part model

Captures follow the same philosophy with their own two-part model:

1. Seat + included allowance — your plan seat includes a pooled monthly capture allowance. Captures within it are covered by the seat and never draw from your prepaid credit balance, so a seat-covered organization keeps capturing even with an empty wallet.
2. Metered overage — captures beyond the allowance are metered from the credit balance at a published markup over raw capture cost, itemized as a capture overage entry in your transaction history.

Beyond-allowance metering is fail-closed: it only happens when pay-as-you-go is enabled — without the opt-in, capture stops rather than silently charging. The same optional monthly cap bounds capture overage alongside the other metered features.

Turning it on

1. Open Settings → Billing → Credits.
2. In the Pay-as-you-go card, toggle Enable pay-as-you-go.
3. Optionally set a monthly cap — a hard ceiling on overage spend so you're never surprised.

Pay-as-you-go is off by default — no organization is ever charged overage without an owner or admin explicitly opting in. Charges come from the same prepaid credit balance your captures use, only the units beyond your included allowance are billed, and every charge is itemized in your transaction history as a "feature overage" entry.

Buying credits

Credits are currently sold manually — request them from Settings → Billing → Credits → Request Credits and the platform team tops up your balance (tier-aware requests can auto-approve). Self-serve card checkout is on the roadmap.

Budget Advisor

The budget advisor analyzes actual 7-day rolling daily cost (not estimates) and classifies each project:

• Critical — Less than 7 days of runway remaining
• Warning — Less than 14 days remaining
• Healthy — Sufficient budget for current usage patterns
• Idle — Budget allocated but no recent captures

Based on these classifications, the advisor generates smart recommendations:

• Transfer — Move budget from idle projects to starving ones
• Increase — Use unallocated org pool for underfunded projects
• Request Credits — Org pool exhausted, request more from platform owner

Onboarding Bonus

New organizations that complete their setup receive a one-time $1 onboarding credit and an auto-provisioned OpenRouter API key. Eligibility requires:

• An organization name of at least 2 characters
• At least 1 project created
• At least 5 prompts configured

Credit Requests

Organization admins can request additional credits:

1. Navigate to Settings → Organization → Credits
2. Enter the amount needed and a brief reason
3. The Platform Owner reviews the request in the Platform Cockpit
4. On approval, credits are added automatically and the org's OpenRouter key limit is synced

Where to Check Credits

• Header widget — Balance and runway shown next to the notifications bell
• Dashboard — Credit health alert appears when runway drops below 14 days
• Settings → Organization — Full breakdown with per-project budgets, usage history, and the budget advisor

Budget Alerts

The system runs proactive budget checks every 6 hours:

• Org pool low — Less than 20% of allocated credits remaining
• Project exhausted — Project budget fully consumed
• Project running low — Less than 14 days remaining at current burn rate
• Platform insufficient — Estimated monthly cost exceeds platform balance

Cost-Anomaly Protection

Beyond budgets, a cost-anomaly guard protects against runaway spend. If an organization's hourly capture cost spikes far above its recent 7-day average — both the multiple and an absolute hourly floor are plan-tier-aware, so higher tiers tolerate higher legitimate spend — new captures are paused before the spike can drain the credit pool. It is a safety brake, not a quota.

When a scheduled capture keeps getting refused — whether by this guard, an empty credit balance, or an exhausted project budget — the platform raises a stalled-schedule alert that names the specific cause and the matching fix (e.g. "cost-anomaly auto-pause" vs "insufficient credits" vs "project budget exhausted"), and escalates it if monitoring stays dark for a week or more. Always read the cause on the alert before acting — for example, topping up credits will not clear an anomaly pause.

Cost Estimation

Each project's estimated monthly cost is calculated from:

prompts × frequency_multiplier × active_models × avg_cost_per_snapshot

The average cost per snapshot is computed from actual 7-day data for the project, falling back to platform-wide averages when project data is insufficient.

API Key Management

Each organization can have an auto-provisioned OpenRouter sub-key with a credit limit matching their allocation. The key lifecycle:

1. Created when platform owner provisions the organization
2. Limit synced whenever credits are added or budgets change
3. Disabled if the organization is paused
4. Deleted if the organization is removed

Organizations can also bring their own API keys (BYOK) which bypass the credit system entirely.