Usage and credits
What a credit is, what actually spends one, how the monthly grant refreshes, and how to read the ledger.
Allowances and what is metered can be configured per license, so the authenticated Usage & Credits screen is authoritative for your account. That screen is available to organization admins and owners; members see the balance in the header instead.
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 bought 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 uses credits — an explainer of which operations are metered and which are free. It is reference material, not a breakdown of your own spending.
- The ledger — every entry, grouped by day.
Ledger entry types
| Entry | What happened |
|---|---|
| Monthly credits added | The period’s allowance was granted |
| Trial credits added | A trial allowance was granted |
| Free credits added | A free-tier allowance was granted |
| Credits rolled over | Unused credits carried into the new period |
| Top-up | Credits were bought |
| Document review | A RealityCheck run was charged |
| Credits expired | Unused credits from a closed period were zeroed |
| Account adjustment | BriefCatch corrected the balance |
| Refund | A charge was reversed |
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, owners and admins buy top-ups. This is deliberately looser than the rest of billing, where the subscription and payment method are owner-only: running out of credits stops work, so the fix does not require the one person who holds the card.
Members cannot open this screen. A member sees the remaining balance in the header, but the Usage and credits page — and the purchase controls on it — are admin and owner only. If you are a member and the balance is low, ask an admin. 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
- Use RealityCheck — the only feature that spends credits
- Billing — invoices and payment method
- Roles and permissions — who can buy a top-up
- Teams and organizations — pooled team credits