Your AI Budget
What uses your monthly AI allowance, what costs nothing at all, and what happens when it runs low.
~3 minutesMost of Comment Coach doesn't use AI at all
Worth saying before anything else, because it is the bigger half of the app. None of this touches your AI allowance, on any plan, however much you use it:
- Everything Bible. Reading, searching, cross-references, Strong's numbers, the interlinear, comparing translations. Your Bibles live on your device — no network call, no allowance.
- Your library. Imported articles and books, and searching them.
- Text from images and PDFs. Handled on our server, not by an AI model.
- The meeting timer and timed practice.
- Writing, editing and organising your own comments — the outline, tags, the portfolio, export.
- The tagging that happens when you save a comment. That one is AI, and it is on us: you asked to save a comment, not to spend anything.
The allowance covers the things you press a button for and wait on: generating comments, coaching, translation, bilingual review, research, and asking questions of your study notes.
How much you get
15 AI uses a month on the free plan, and 300 on a subscription. The meter is in the app — a small bar at the bottom of the sidebar, and in more detail under Settings → AI.
It resets on the first of the month. Unused allowance does not roll over; extra usage you have bought does, and does not expire while your account is open.
What each use costs
One rule, and it has no exceptions: you are charged for the quality you actually receive.
Quick costs 1. It is fast, and it is the right tool for translation, refinements and variations. Thoughtful costs 3. It thinks harder, and it is what coaching and research want.
On the free plan everything runs at Quick quality, so every use costs 1 — even when you ask for Thoughtful. You are never charged the higher rate for the faster answer.
What happens when it runs low
The bar turns amber as you approach the end, and red when it is gone. Nothing stops abruptly.
When the monthly allowance runs out, Thoughtful requests quietly become Quick ones — and are charged the Quick price of 1, not the price you asked for. You keep working, at the faster quality. Only after ten more Quick uses past zero does AI pause until the reset.
A request that fails costs you nothing. If the model cannot be reached, or returns something unusable, the credit goes straight back.
If you need more
Three ways, and it is worth knowing which is which:
Wait for the reset. The allowance comes back on the first of the month, and the app tells you the date.
Subscribe, if you are on the free plan. A paid plan raises the allowance and unlocks Thoughtful quality.
Use your own API key. Add an Anthropic key in Settings and your allowance stops applying — you pay Anthropic directly, usually a few cents per coaching session. The key is kept in your browser and never stored on our servers.
Worth knowing
- Live translation adds up. It runs roughly one use a minute while it is on, so an hour of it is about sixty. Turn it off when you are not using it.
- Coaching the same comment again costs again. Each round is a fresh request. Two or three rounds is usually where the gains stop.
- Nothing is charged twice. If a generation has to retry internally, that is on us, not on your allowance.
- Check before a big session. Settings → AI shows what is left and when it resets.