# Overage and budgets

> What happens when you use more conversations than your plan includes, how the overage budget works and which alerts you get.

Source: https://shopassist.coec.dk/docs/billing/overage-and-budgets · Updated 2026-10-01

Paid plans include a number of managed AI conversations per month. Beyond that, each conversation is billed at your plan's overage rate (see [pricing](/pricing)). Free has no overage: it stops at its cap.

## Overage budget [#budget]

Set a monthly overage budget under **Billing → Overage budget** (owners only). The default is one month of your plan's base price.

* **Continue** (default for direct billing): the assistant keeps working; the overage is invoiced at the end of the period.
* **Pause AI** (default for Shopify): when the budget is reached, managed AI pauses until the next period. Raising the budget takes effect immediately.

For direct billing, Stripe may invoice early when the overage gets large, as a safeguard against misuse.

## Alerts [#alerts]

| When                            | You get                                     |
| ------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------- |
| 80 % of included conversations  | email and info banner                       |
| 100 % of included conversations | email with the overage rate and budget      |
| 80 % of the overage budget      | email and warning banner                    |
| Overage budget reached          | email; with **Pause AI** an error banner    |
| 80 % / 100 % of the Free cap    | email, warning or error banner with upgrade |

Organizations with webhooks also receive `usage.threshold_reached` [events](/docs/webhooks/events#usage-threshold-reached).

## BYOK usage [#byok]

Conversations on your own key do not use the included managed conversations and are never billed as overage. On paid plans they are subject to a fair-use limit; Free has a hard cap.