AI Usage & Budgets
How AI usage is metered, what happens when you hit your budget, and how overages work.
Last updated Apr 2, 2026
The mental model
Usage budgets exist so you can plan, not so we can penalize you.
Every plan includes a monthly AI budget. When you hit your limit, Grantable pauses AI features and shows you exactly where you stand — how much you’ve used, what your options are, and how to keep going. You can purchase extra usage immediately or upgrade your plan for a larger monthly allocation.
How metering works
Every AI interaction uses a small amount of your monthly budget. The cost depends on two things: the model tier and the complexity of the conversation.
- Fast (Haiku) — lowest cost per message, great for quick lookups
- Auto (Sonnet) — moderate cost, the default for most work
- Pro (Sonnet, higher quality) — highest cost, best for complex writing
Longer conversations, file-heavy contexts, and multi-step tasks naturally use more budget than simple questions. This isn’t a gotcha — it’s just how AI processing works.
Your budget by plan
Each plan includes a monthly AI budget that scales with the tier — Free gives you enough to explore, Starter gives you room to work, Pro gives you a generous budget for full-time grant work, and Pro+ provides the largest allocation for teams working across multiple grants simultaneously. See Plans & Pricing for details.
Your budget resets at the start of each billing cycle.
When you hit your budget
When your monthly AI budget runs out, Grantable pauses AI features and shows a clear prompt with your options. Your workspace, files, and everything else remain fully accessible — only AI-powered actions (chat, document generation, funder research) pause until you add more budget.
You have two ways to keep going:
- Purchase extra usage — From Settings > Billing, buy an overage pack that takes effect immediately and restores full AI access for the remainder of your billing cycle.
- Upgrade your plan — Move to a higher tier for a larger monthly allocation. The upgrade applies immediately and resets your budget.
Free accounts have a daily limit of 5 AI messages instead of a monthly budget. This resets every day.
Keeping an eye on usage
Check your current usage from Settings > Billing > AI Usage.
You’ll see how much of your monthly budget you’ve used, your current consumption rate, and an estimate of how many days remain at your current pace. No surprises.
Spending your budget wisely
The single most effective way to conserve budget is to give the AI better context up front. When Grantable has your org profile, uploaded source materials, and a specific prompt, it gets closer to what you need on the first try. Fewer back-and-forth iterations means less budget spent.
A few practical habits:
- Use Fast for quick questions. Save your Auto and Pro budget for the writing and analysis work that actually benefits from a more capable model.
- Upload source materials before you start writing. Past proposals, annual reports, and program descriptions give the AI evidence to work with instead of generating from scratch.
- Be specific in your prompts. “Draft the needs statement for the youth mentoring program using data from the 2025 annual report” uses less budget than “Write something about our programs” followed by three rounds of revisions.
- If you consistently hit your ceiling, upgrading to the next plan tier is usually more cost-effective than buying overage packs.
Pro tip: Run
/profileto build out your organization profile. A complete profile improves first-draft quality across everything the AI does — which means fewer iterations, less budget, and better results. It’s the single highest-ROI thing you can do.