Usage & Budgets: how organization billing works

Organizations on Cesura are billed through usage banks: your organization holds a shared credit pool, and every kind of usage draws from it. You manage all of it from the Budget management tab of the Credits page: open Organization Management, select Credits, then select Budget management. The tab's heading reads Usage & Budgets. The Credits page's other tabs cover the balance, consumption, purchase history and alerts: see The Credits page: track balance and request more credits.

The six pools

Your credits live in six pools, each paying for a different kind of usage. Each one is either charged against the balance or free (metered for reporting, never debited).

Pool	What it pays for	Default for an organization
Workspace runs	Simulations learners run inside workspaces	1 credit / run — 2 for a voice run
Personal challenges	A learner’s own Personal Simulation — building the scenario and running it	2 credits / challenge
Testing runs	Runs in testing spaces (your own checks)	Free, on every plan
Prof. Cesura (AI builder)	AI-assisted simulation creation	Free, on every plan
Translation	Translating a simulation into another language	Free unless your plan prices it
Direct runs	Runs launched outside any space	Free unless your plan prices it

The principle behind the defaults: an organization pays for delivery, not for authoring. Building an activity and testing it are work you are already paying seats for, so testing runs and Professor Cesura builds are free on every organization account and cannot be priced by a plan. Only a learner actually taking a simulation draws credits.

Editing a simulation by hand, adding forms or quizzes, sharing, and viewing results never cost credits. Credits do not expire unless the pool or budget holding them has an expiry date.

A charged Workspace-runs pool also seeds one free retry per member: after a member is charged for an activity, their next repeat run of it is free. Cesura can raise, lower or remove it to match your contract.

The Budget management tab

At the top sits the credit pool — the shared balance, its health badge, and a caption reading In pool: … · In budgets: … so you can see at a glance how much is loose and how much is fenced into project budgets. The pool also holds four account-wide defaults that belong to no single pool: the default cost per use, default free retries per member, grace credits and the low-balance threshold. You can change the Low-balance threshold from the pool's Edit; Cesura sets the other three for your contract.

Below it are four tabs:

User budgets — a spending allowance per creator, so no one person can drain the pool. User budgets: spending allowances for creators
Project budgets — carve the Workspace runs pool into dedicated balances for teams or courses. Project budgets: dedicated balances for teams & courses
Pricing — what each pool costs per use, and whether it is charged at all.
Limits — the caps that stop a run, plus the fair-use policy that applies to every member. See Fair use and the credit chip.

Pricing and Limits are covered in Pricing & Limits: what each pool costs and what stops a run.

A separate Licenses page controls how many members can hold each role (Creator, Instructor, Viewer). Licenses: managing Creator, Instructor & Viewer roles

What you can change, and what Cesura sets

Some settings are yours and some are platform policy. Rather than hiding what you may not change, the page shows it with a Set by Cesura marker — so “this is not mine to change” never looks like “this does not exist”. The fair-use policy is the main example: you can read it, but only Cesura can change it.

Only a Cesura system administrator can switch a pool between charged and free. If a pool that should be charged is showing as free, or the reverse, ask through Contact support under Get help in the sidebar.

Who pays for a run?

A run inside a space is always charged to the space owner’s organization — never to the learner. Learners, including anonymous participants who open a shared link, do not need credits of their own. AI simulation building is metered to the person who runs the builder.

Status at a glance

Each pool shows a status badge: OK, Low (below its low-balance threshold), Empty, Expired, or Unlimited (usage is metered but never blocked). When everything is fine you see “All banks are healthy.”

When the pool or a budget turns low, runs out, is about to expire, or expires, Cesura emails your organization admins. Unless you set a low-balance threshold yourself, a balance counts as low relative to the most it has ever held, so a small budget does not alert the moment you fund it. The email names the budget it is about. See The Credits page for who receives it and how the threshold is set.

Adding credits

You can move credits freely between the pool and your project budgets. To add new credits to your organization’s pool, request them in the app:

Open the Overview tab of the Credits page.
Select Buy more credits.
Enter the Credits to purchase, add an optional message, and select Send purchase request.

Nothing is charged when you send the request. A Cesura representative contacts you to confirm the price and payment, and the request completes on its own when the credits are added. Track it on the History tab.