Credits and billing
Everything in Programfolio except the AI is unmetered: the catalog, your roster, shortlists, notes, collections, the application tracker, exports and share emails cost nothing and have no quota. Credits exist for one thing — running a model.
What one credit buys
One credit = one AI recommendation run for one student. The first match on a student and every Re-run after it each cost one credit. The charge is taken immediately before the model is called; if the model fails, the exact amount is refunded automatically.
A run sends the student’s grade, GPA, intended majors, activities, budget, geography and format preference. It does not send their name or any contact detail.
When a run is free
- Nothing has changed. Results are cached against a fingerprint of the student’s profile and the catalog. Reopening the panel, or asking again after editing nothing, serves the cached run and costs nothing.
- There is nothing to recommend. If every candidate program is already on the student’s shortlist, there is no model call and no charge.
Change the student’s profile — a new GPA, a different major, a budget — and the fingerprint changes, so the next run is a real one and costs a credit. That is the intent: you are paying for a fresh answer to a changed question.
Two kinds of credit
- Plan credits
- Your monthly allotment. They reset at the start of each billing cycle — unused plan credits do not accumulate.
- Top-up credits
- Bought as a one-off pack. They roll over and stay until you spend them. The credits a new counselor account receives on confirming its email address are top-up credits, so they never expire.
Spending always draws from plan credits first, so a purchased pack is never burned while a monthly allowance is sitting unused. Your balance and full history are in Settings → Billing & credits, and every debit, refund and grant is listed in your data export.
Who holds a wallet
Counselors and platform admins. Student and parent accounts hold no wallet, because AI recommendations are a counselor feature — nothing on their surfaces can spend.
Institute pools
When an institute has a subscription, its counselors spend from one shared pool rather than their own wallets, and switch back automatically if they leave. An institute admin can set a monthly cap per counselor against the pool from Institute → Billing; a counselor with no cap is limited only by the pool itself. Pool members see the shared balance and their own cap in Settings rather than purchase buttons — only the institute admin can buy.
If a payment fails
A failed renewal is a warning, not a shutdown. Your balance is not frozen: top-up credits were paid for separately, and the plan credits you hold are the remainder of a cycle you already paid for. What stops is the refill — the next month’s grant only arrives when an invoice is paid, so the account simply runs down while the card is retried.
A banner appears under the top bar for as long as it lasts, with a button to the billing portal. If it is your institute’s subscription and you are not its admin, the banner says so rather than offering you a portal you cannot open — the same grace applies to the pool, so an institute’s failed renewal never strands the counselors who cannot fix it.
If a subscription is cancelled outright, the monthly grant stops but the credits already in the account stay. We do not claw back what was paid for.
Cancelling
Settings → Billing & credits → Manage billing opens the Stripe portal, where you can change a plan, update a card or cancel. An institute’s subscription is managed from Institute → Billing by its admin.
Cancel before deleting an account: a live subscription would otherwise keep billing a customer who no longer exists here, so it blocks the deletion until it is settled. See Your data.