- Seat pricing charges for capability, not use, so the light month subsidises the heavy one.
- Per-call pricing collapses to zero on a quiet month, which is most months.
- Credits are workspace-shared, so adding a colleague costs nothing until they ask something.
- Failed calls are refunded — per-call billing only works if a failure is free.
Where the seat model breaks
Social research is bursty. You need it hard during a launch, a crisis, a competitor's announcement, and not at all for six weeks afterwards. A subscription smooths that into a flat line and charges you for the flat line. The quiet weeks are pure loss. The busy ones hit a quota you now have to ration.
Team access makes it worse: the person who would ask one good question a quarter never gets a seat, because a seat is $49.
- Quiet month: a subscription bills, credits do not.
- Busy week: a quota throttles, credits scale.
- New colleague: a seat costs, a credit balance is shared.
What a Nooticr credit buys
A fetch. A mention sweep is priced per network searched: a three-network search costs three, a ten-network search costs ten. A transcript is one call. A comment thread is one call. Reads that cost us nothing — your balance, your connections, your watch list — cost you nothing.
The price of every paid tool is in the description the model reads, so an assistant can tell you what something will cost before it runs it.
Tip:Ask "what would that cost?" first. The number comes from the tool list, not an estimate.
"Social AI" is two categories wearing one label
Search social AI and you get two unrelated things: products that generate social content, and products that help you understand it. The first is crowded, cheap to build and mostly interchangeable — a prompt and a scheduler. The second is harder, because it needs data the model does not have.
The AI social tools worth paying for are in the second group, and the tell is what they charge for. A generator bills for output it produced. A reader bills for material it fetched, which means it has costs that scale with your questions rather than with your subscription.
- Generation: cheap to build, priced per seat, output you could have written.
- Comprehension: needs a data source, priced per fetch, tells you something new.
The honest limits
Per-call pricing loses to a subscription when usage is constant and heavy. A five-person insights team sweeping daily will spend more here than on a mid-tier seat. And there is no annual invoice to put through procurement, which for some companies is a real obstacle rather than a feature.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens when credits run out?
Paid tools stop and say why; free reads keep working, so you can always see your balance and your watches. Top-ups go through Stripe and land automatically.
Is there a minimum or a contract?
Neither. Twenty free credits, then packs you buy when you need them. Nothing renews.
Do unused credits expire?
No. They sit in the workspace balance until something spends them.