Usage and credits
What a credit is, what actually spends one, how the monthly grant refreshes, and how to read the ledger.
Credits are BriefCatch’s metered unit. Usage & Credits tracks what is left, what you have spent, and when the balance refreshes.
What spends a credit
This is the part worth getting right, because most of the product does not touch credits at all.
Free — no credits
Uploading a document, running the review, working through suggestions, citation-format corrections, exports, and reports.
Metered — spends credits
RealityCheck. Verifying that cited authorities support the propositions they are cited for is the charged operation.
So a heavy week of drafting and editing costs nothing. A week of verifying every citation in three briefs does.
The charge is settled when the run is taken in, not incrementally as verdicts arrive, so a run either charges or it does not.
Where credits come from
Two sources, and the difference matters when the balance runs low:
- The monthly grant — your plan’s allowance, granted each billing period. On an individual plan it is yours; on a team plan it is pooled and calculated from the seat count.
- Top-ups — credits an owner buys on top of the grant.
Monthly credits are consumed first, and unused monthly credits expire at the end of the period. Purchased top-ups are only drawn on after the monthly grant is gone. That ordering is deliberate: a top-up you paid for is never quietly burned while free credits sit unused.
Reading the screen
The top of the page is the balance: how many credits remain, a meter against the period’s allowance, and a status — healthy, low, or out. Below that:
- The trend chart — spend over the last 7, 30, or 90 days.
- What used them — which operations consumed credits, with free operations marked as free so the picture is complete rather than just the charged part.
- The ledger — every entry, grouped by day.
Ledger entry types
| Entry | What happened |
|---|---|
| Monthly grant | The period’s allowance was added |
| Purchase | A top-up was bought |
| Run charge | A RealityCheck run was charged |
| Expiry | Unused credits from a closed period were zeroed |
| Adjustment | BriefCatch corrected the balance, with a note explaining why |
Each entry shows the amount and the running balance, so you can trace any number on the page back to the events that produced it.
Running out
When the balance reaches zero, RealityCheck stops until the period refreshes or someone buys a top-up. Everything else — upload, review, suggestions, exports — keeps working, because none of it is metered.
On a team plan, only the owner can buy credits. Members see the balance and the warning; the purchase control is not theirs. See Roles and permissions.
Team pools
On a pooled plan the whole organization draws from one balance. Anyone can spend it, and there is no per-member cap, so a low balance is a shared problem rather than an individual one. The ledger shows what was spent and when, which is the honest way to find out where a month went.
Related: Plans and licenses · Billing · RealityCheck.