Pricing & Limits: what each pool costs and what stops a run

Two tabs on the Budget management tab of the Credits page (Organization Management → Credits → Budget management) decide what usage costs and what stops it: Pricing answers “how much”, and Limits answers “until when, and how often”. Every pool appears on both. For how the pools fit together, start with the overview: Usage & Budgets: how organization billing works.

Charged or free

Every pool is in one of two funding modes:

• Charged — each use is taken from the available balance, and usage stops when credits run out.
• Free — usage is tracked for reporting but never charged and never blocked for lack of credits. On an organization account, testing runs and Professor Cesura builds are always free; translation and direct runs are free unless your plan prices them.

Switching a pool between the two is a Cesura decision, not an organization one. The buttons — Charge for this channel and Make this channel free — appear only for Cesura system administrators. If a pool is in the wrong mode for your contract, ask through Contact support under Get help in the sidebar.

A free pool shows the line “Unlimited — usage is tracked but never charged” and offers no Edit on the Pricing tab. That is deliberate: nothing is debited, so a price, a retry allowance, a grace buffer and a low-balance alert would all charge nobody. Open its Pricing dialog and it says so outright: “This channel is free: runs are metered but never charged, so there is nothing to price.” The caps on the Limits tab still apply either way — those are what govern a free pool.

The Pricing tab

Each pool shows its current rate. A rate the pool did not set of its own shows (account default) and comes from the pool hero’s account-wide settings.

Cesura sets the rate, free retries and grace credits to match your contract, and they carry a Set by Cesura marker. The one pricing setting you change yourself is the Low-balance threshold, on the credit pool and on each project budget.

A field appears only where it takes effect. A free pool shows none of them. A pool that draws from the shared balance shows the rate and the retry allowance, but not grace or the low-balance threshold — those live on the funding source, the pool hero. A project budget with its own fenced balance shows all four. So a dialog that offers you a field is a dialog where changing it will do something.

A voice simulation is not priced separately: it is charged as two runs of whatever the Workspace runs rate is. Set the rate to 1 and a voice run costs 2; negotiate a rate of 0.8 and a voice run costs 1.6.

The Limits tab

Cesura sets these caps with you. Organization admins can read them here but not change them; to change one, ask through Contact support under Get help in the sidebar.

If no pool has a cap and you cannot set one, the tab says so in a line — “No channel caps are set” — rather than listing a row per pool that reads “No limit set” beside a lock.

Fair use

The fair-use policy sits on the Limits tab. It gives every member the same allowance over a rolling window, and it is platform policy: organization administrators can read it, but only Cesura can change it.

It exists because free is not the same as unmetered. Once a pool is free, nothing else throttles it, so fair use is the only ceiling on runaway use. The default scope is free channels only; it can also be off entirely, or cover every channel.

Usage counts in units, not credits, because the allowance is sized on what a run costs Cesura rather than what it costs you:

A testing run weighs a full unit even though it is free to you: the discount is a price, not a cost. Two windows apply at once — a burst allowance over a few hours and a weekly one — and a member is paused when either is exhausted. Both are rolling windows: earlier runs age out as time passes, and the pause lifts on its own. If your team genuinely needs a larger allowance, ask Cesura; the answer is to raise the policy, not to start charging for authoring.

The header stays quiet about fair use until a member is close to a limit. From 90% of a window, the credit chip at the top of the app turns red (a member with no credit chip sees a red chip with the count), and when they reach the limit it reads Paused until a time. Its tooltip says their credits are not the cause, because a fair-use pause is not a billing problem and buying credits does not lift it, and points to the profile page. Each member’s full standing, with a bar per window and how much each activity counts, is on the Fair use tab of their profile page. See Fair use and the credit chip.

What learners see when a limit is hit

When a cap or an empty balance blocks a run, the learner sees a plain message — for example “You’ve reached your limit for now”, with the time they can try again when the cap has a rolling window. A fair-use pause shows Fair-use limit reached with the time the limit resets. The full list of messages and what to do about each is in Why can’t a learner start a simulation?

Voice runs cost double, and any creator can turn them on

A simulation switched to audio is charged as two runs instead of one, and it counts double against your organization’s fair-use allowance.

Audio used to be something Cesura enabled per organization, so an administrator stood between a creator and that cost. It is now on by default for every organization, new ones included, and any creator can make a simulation a voice call from its Delivery Mode tab without asking anyone. Worth telling your creators before the first doubled invoice. An organization admin who would rather not allow it can switch Voice simulations off in the organization’s Preferences. See Set up a voice simulation (the Audio page).