What it costs, and managing credits

ClearTalk runs on credits. There's no hard usage limit — every minute of conversation and every message draws from your balance — which means the two things worth understanding are how fast it draws down, and what happens when it hits zero.

Two buckets

Your balance is made of two kinds of credit, and they behave differently:

• Plan credits — granted with your subscription, refreshed at each renewal. They don't roll over: whatever is unused when the period ends is gone.
• Purchased credits — top-ups you buy. They never expire and sit underneath your plan credits, so plan credits are spent first.

You can see the split, and the date your plan credits reset, on the credit indicator at the top of any page or on Billing → Overview.

Plan credits

Included with your subscription

• Granted when your plan starts, and again at each renewal.
• Reset every billing period — whatever is unused is lost, not carried over.
• Spent first, before anything you've bought.

Purchased credits

Top-ups you buy

• Bought whenever you want, from the credit indicator in the header.
• Never expire — they sit underneath your plan credits indefinitely.
• This is the bucket auto-recharge watches and refills.

What draws them down

Three meters, shown on Billing → Overview under "Your rates":

Two things people forget: inbound calls cost the same as outbound — a busy support line consumes credits just as a dialling campaign does — and testing consumes credits, since a simulated caller having a conversation with your pathway is a conversation. Neither is large, but both belong in the forecast.

If you're an agency client, the rates shown are the ones your agency set for you.

Forecasting a campaign

Do this before a big run, not after. The arithmetic:

dials × connect rate × average call length × per-minute rate

Worked example. You're calling 1,000 leads:

• Realistically, around 30% answer — so ~300 real conversations. (Your own connect rate from past campaigns beats this estimate; find it in Reports.)
• Those conversations average 2.5 minutes — so ~750 minutes.
• At a rate of $0.15/minute, that's about $112.

Then add the calls that didn't connect. Voicemails and no-answers still occupy a short amount of call time — usually a small fraction of the total, but on 700 unanswered dials it's not nothing. A sensible planning number is your calculated figure plus 15–20%.

The same shape works for texting: messages sent × per-message rate, remembering that a conversation is many messages, not one.

Not running dry

A campaign that exhausts your balance stops. Two defences:

Auto-recharge — on Billing → Overview, save a card and set a threshold and a top-up amount. When your balance drops below the threshold, ClearTalk buys more automatically. One thing that isn't obvious on screen: the recharge amount has to be larger than the threshold — equal values are rejected.

Note that auto-recharge watches your purchased credits, not your plan credits. If you're running mostly on plan credits, keep a small purchased balance so there's something for the threshold to protect.

Or check before big runs. If you'd rather not leave a card on file, make a habit of looking at the balance before launching anything large, and top up manually. The risk you're accepting is a campaign stopping partway through.

Keeping the bill sensible

• Shorter calls cost less and often convert better. An agent that gets to the point is cheaper twice over.
• Don't dial bad lists. Every disconnected number and wrong number is spend with no chance of return — see list hygiene.
• Decide your voicemail policy. Leaving a message on every unanswered dial costs real minutes across a large campaign. Sometimes right, sometimes not — but make it a decision.
• Watch cost per result, not cost per call. Reports shows spend alongside outcomes. A campaign with a higher per-call cost and triple the booking rate is the cheaper campaign.

For the billing screen itself — your plan, usage against caps, payment details, and invoices — see Plans and billing.