Alsona credits track one thing: signals. One credit equals one signal detected. Nothing else on the platform consumes them.
One credit, one signal
Every time Alsona detects a signal for one of your agents, that costs one credit. A hiring post, a LinkedIn engagement, a tech stack change, an ad going live: each detection is a credit.
That means the "signals detected" counter on an agent's Intent Signals tab is effectively your credit meter. Add up signals detected across your agents in the current period and you have your usage.
What does not use credits
AI generation is free. Every message Alsona writes for you, every AI Contextual Outreach draft, every Help Me Write suggestion, every auto-reply from an outreach mode: none of it touches your credits. You are not paying per email or per LinkedIn message.
Neither is anything else in the workflow. Sending messages, running senders, adding agents, inviting your team, connecting integrations. Credits are consumed at detection, not at outreach.
The practical consequence: how much you send has nothing to do with your credit spend. What you track does.
Reading the meter
The pill in the top right of every screen shows your usage for the current billing period. Click it and you get three numbers: used, remaining, and total.
The number on the left counts up, not down. It is what you have used so far this period, not what you have left.
NEEDS CONFIRMING — What happens when you reach the cap. Do agents stop detecting new signals, do they queue, or does usage continue as overage? This is the first question anyone near their limit will ask, and I could not determine it from the interface.
When it resets
At the start of each billing period. It is a period allowance, not a balance you top up.
Controlling your spend
Because credits are consumed at detection, your controls are all on the Intent Signals tab of each agent.
Turn on fewer sources. Each source you enable is another stream of detections. Thirty-one sources across nine categories are available, but an agent tracking six well-chosen ones will usually outperform one tracking twenty.
Use Customize to narrow. Once a source is switched on, a Customize dropdown appears with Track chips that tighten what qualifies. Hiring Demand Momentum can watch current openings only rather than every growth window. Reviews can watch negative only. Technology Stack Changes can watch replacements only. Narrowing a source cuts detections without turning the source off.
Add required keywords where they are offered. LinkedIn Audience Engagement requires keywords before it will run, and those keywords are what stop it from detecting every post your target companies interact with.
Watch the funnel, not just the first number. The Intent Signals tab shows signals detected, then high-intent companies, then identified prospects, then pushed to outreach. If a source is generating a lot of detections and almost no prospects, it is spending credits without producing pipeline. That is the source to narrow or switch off.
Check the breakdown by signal source. It shows detected, contacted, reply rate, and positive replies per source. A source with high detection volume and a weak reply rate is your most expensive one.
Custom signals
If none of the standard sources track what matters to your market, you can request a custom signal. Reach out and describe what you want to detect and we will look at whether we can build it.
Custom signals may consume credits at a different rate than standard ones. It depends on what the signal requires to detect. We will tell you the rate before anything goes live, so you are never surprised by a custom source on your bill.
Keeping an eye on it
Check the meter when you add an agent or switch on a new source, then again a few days later. That tells you what the change actually costs.
If usage jumps, go to the agent you changed most recently and look at the breakdown by signal source. The increase will almost always trace to one source.
Review the funnel monthly. Sources drift in value as your market changes, and a source worth tracking in March may be noise by August.