Usage and cost

BackTalk runs on the keys you bring, so there is no usage for us to meter or mark up. To keep those keys predictable, the Usage & cost page logs what they spend. Open it from Settings → Usage & cost. It is an owner and admin page; members are sent back to the inbox.

What is tracked

Two things cost money on your keys, and both are logged the moment they happen with the cost estimated at that instant's list prices:

• AI calls: sentiment and categorisation scoring, and the AI visibility probes, on your own AI provider key.
• Brave queries: the metered web searches that power Reddit, Substack, Medium and LinkedIn, on your Brave Search key.

Everything else (Hacker News, dev.to, GitHub, the free YouTube and Stack Exchange APIs, and Bluesky on the deployment's shared account) has no dollar cost on your keys, so it does not appear here.

Reading the page

Four tiles summarise the top: AI requests, Brave queries, Est. cost this month, and Est. cost (90 days). Below them:

• By month breaks the last 90 days into monthly rows with AI requests, AI cost, Brave queries, Brave cost, and a total.
• Recent AI calls and Recent Brave usage list individual calls with the feature, model or platform, tokens or query count, and estimated cost.

Totals cover the last 90 days. The figures are estimates for this app only; your providers' own consoles remain the authority for billing.

Sponsored probes cost you nothing

If your deployment funds sponsored AI probes, those calls run on a shared key, not yours. They are labelled as sponsored, and every cost figure on this page excludes them, so the money you see is only what your own keys spent. The raw request counters count every probe, sponsored or not.