Understanding usage and billing

Cartfilo bills on weighted shopper messages per calendar month — not conversations, not tokens, not seats.

What counts as a message

A standard reply counts as 1 message. A multi-item basket build (a shopper asking for several things across categories at once) counts as 3, since it costs more to compute. The weighting is always shown in your dashboard before it’s applied — see pricing for the full plan table.

What happens if you go over

Paid plans bill overage per message at a rate that drops as your plan tier increases. The Free plan has no overage billing — instead, once you cross your monthly included-message cap, Cartfilo switches to a lighter-weight serving mode rather than cutting shoppers off entirely. Your dashboard shows a clear banner explaining exactly why, with the real numbers, and a link to upgrade.

AI chat vs. human chat

Every plan has two separate quotas, both shown on the pricing page: an AI chat quota and a Human chat quota, which is always 5× the AI quota. Only messages the AI assistant answers itself count against the AI chat quota and the weighted-message billing described above. Conversations handed off to your team draw from the separate Human chat quota instead, so a busy support week never eats into your AI allowance.

Need more human chat quota than your plan includes? Raise a support ticket and tell us why — it’s a quick, straightforward request. We raise your limit right away as long as the usage looks like real shopper traffic and not system-resource abuse.

Chat history retention

Every plan retains chat history for a fixed window (30 days on Free, up to 730 days on Enterprise). Older conversations are not retrievable past that window — export anything you need to keep before it rolls off. See pricing for the full per-plan retention ladder.

The Billing page in your admin navigation shows your current plan, a progress bar of messages used against your included allowance for the period, and the same plan table from Choosing a plan with a Switch button to change tiers at any time.

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