Overview

This article provides complete information about how the virtual assistants are billed, how to track the usage and the usage limits or quotas that are applied for various features.

Kore.ai’s XO platform offers various usage and support plans. The usage plans are required if you want to build virtual assistants with more granular features. The licenses, usage, and limits of the Virtual Assistants developed using the Kore.ai XO Platform are governed by the terms and conditions of your account with Kore.ai. To learn more, read usage plans.

The support plans are required, when you want to troubleshoot the issues that arises when you are using Kore.ai’s platform modules. To learn more, read support plans.

Before we go into the details, let us quickly understand the following key terms and concepts.

Accounts and Users

Account refers to a group of users, who typically belong to an organization or working on a specific project. If you are signing up for a new account, the platform will auto-create an Account as well as a User for you. If you are signing up to join an existing account, the platform will only create a User identity for you with the existing account.

• When you sign up, the platform automatically creates an Account identity and a User identity for you.
• In some scenarios, the system creates only a User identity and associates you to an existing account. Some of the common scenarios are:
  • If you are invited by someone to join their account
  • If your enterprise administrator adds you to your enterprise account through SSO or API
  • If you are using a business email address to sign up, you can choose to join any other accounts that match your email domain. In such cases, the system only creates a User identity for you and adds you to the selected account.
• If you sign up using Single Sign-On (SSO) options like Google or Office 365, the platform will use your email domain as the Account name. For example, if your email address isjohn@doe.com, your account will be created as ‘doe.com’.
• If you sign up using the email address verification option, you can define your account name during the signup process.
• If you are the first user of an account i.e. if you have created the account, then you will automatically become the Account Owner as well.
• If you are an Account Owner, you can change your account’s name from the Profile information section.
• Additional users can be invited to an account using the Invite ‘Team option’ or by inviting users to a particular assistant.  A user can belong to multiple accounts

Account Type

Every account of the Kore.ai Platform will be assigned with an Account Type. Following are the types of accounts:

• Regular Accounts
  • Every account created on the platform is marked as Regular Account by default
  • The assistants can be published using any of the supported Usage Plans
• Enterprise Accounts
  • The accounts of the organizations that have a custom contract with Kore.ai are categorized as Enterprise Accounts
  • When a contract is created, Kore.ai promotes a Standard Account as an Enterprise Account

Plan Types

The Kore.ai XO Platform offers Usage Plans and Support Plans for deploying and managing your assistants. 

• Usage Plans – The Usage Plans are required for publishing the virtual assistants to your end-users. The interactions of the end-users are tracked against the usage plan selected for the virtual assistant.
• Support Plans – The Support Plans are required to get premium support from Kore.ai’s team of experts. Subscription to Support Plans is optional. Help and support resources like Kore.ai Documentation, Kore.ai Community, and Kore.ai Academy are available for all users.

Billing Units

Billing Units are used for measuring the usage of the virtual assistant for the Usage Plans. Based on the Usage Plan associated with your assistant, the Billing Units will be based on the Billing Sessions or Billing Requests. Please refer to the Usage Plans section for more information.

The following information will help you understand more about billing types:

1. 1. Billing Sessions –  A billing session is created for your virtual assistant in any of the following ways:
      • User conversations with virtual assistant
        • A continuous conversation of 15 minutes between the user and the assistant is considered as a Billing Session
        • A Billing Session starts when the first message/request is received from the user and it ends after 15 mins from that point
        • If the conversation goes beyond 15 minutes, then the system creates additional Billing Sessions for every 15 minutes of conversation thereafter
        • Please refer to the table below for some examples.
        • Do note that Billing Sessions are independent of Conversation Sessions. The Conversation Sessions are used for context management and execution.
          

          Example	Billing sessions
          Example 1	Conversation starts at 10:00 am and ends at 10:10 am.  1 Billing Unit is created Unit 1 – 10:00 am to 10:10 am Unit 2 – 10:15 am to 10:30 am Unit 3 – 10:30 am onwards
          Example 2	Conversation starts at 10:00 am and ends at 10:10 am. User returns within 15 minutes of idle time. Starts interacting from 10:20 am and ends at 10:40 am 3 Billing Unit is created Unit 1 – 10:00 am to 10:15 am Unit 2 – 10:15 am to 10:30 am Unit 3 – 10:30 am 10:40 am
          Example 3>	Conversation starts at 10:00 am and ends at 10:10 am. User returns after 15 minutes of idle time. Starts interacting from 10:30 am and ends at 10:40 am 2 Billing Units are created Unit 1 – 10:00 am to 10:15 am Unit 2 – 10:30 am to 10:40 am

        • Delivery of alert notifications
          • If Alert Tasks are used in the assistant, then every notification delivery is considered as a Billing Session
          • This is in addition to the Billing Sessions that get created based on the conversations
   2. Billing Requests –  A billing request is created for your virtual assistant in any of the following ways:
      • Incoming User Messages
        • Every incoming message from the users is considered as Billing Request
        • Billing Requests are created independent of the conversation state. This includes any kind of input from the user, including but not limited to, small talk, intent request, entity inputs, disambiguations, confirmations, etc.  
      • Delivery of alert notifications
        • If Alert Tasks are used in the assistant, then every notification delivery is considered as a Billing Request
        • This is in addition to the Billing Requests that get created based on the income user messages