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Why we killed credit-based pricing (and what we built instead)
Usage meters punish the customers who get the most value. Here's the thinking behind Naviooai's flat plans, and how we keep them honest as models get cheaper.
If you've ever shopped for an AI chatbot platform, you've felt it: the advertised price looks reasonable, then you read the fine print. Credits. Per-resolution fees. Add-ons for the features you actually need. By the time you've modelled real usage, the "cheap" plan costs three times what you expected.
We think that's backwards. So when we designed Naviooai's pricing, we started from a single principle: you should be able to predict your bill.
The problem with credits
Credit systems sound flexible, but in practice they do three things, none of them good for you:
- They punish success. The better your bot performs, the more conversations it handles, the more you pay, often steeply.
- They hide the real cost. The gap between the headline price and a working deployment can be enormous once you add credits, seats and branding removal.
- They make you ration. Teams end up limiting their own bot to avoid overages, which defeats the point of automating support.
If your pricing makes customers afraid to use the product, you've built the wrong pricing.
What we built instead
Naviooai plans are flat. You pick a tier with a clear monthly message allowance, and that's the bill. No credits to top up, no per-resolution surcharge, and white-label is included on Pro rather than sold as an expensive add-on.
When you reach your allowance, the assistant simply pauses new replies until the month resets or you upgrade. Nothing is deleted, and there is no surprise invoice.
Our commitment: no credits, no per-resolution fees, and no charging you automatically, ever. If we change pricing, we will tell you first, not surprise you on an invoice.
But won't that cost you money?
Sometimes, and that's fine. As foundation models get cheaper, flat pricing means we absorb the volatility, not you. We'd rather build a business on customers who trust the bill than squeeze margin out of a meter nobody understands.
It also keeps us honest. Because we don't profit from every extra message, we're incentivised to make each answer good: accurate, cited, and resolved, rather than simply numerous.
The takeaway
Pricing is a product decision, not just a spreadsheet. Flat plans are our way of saying: use Naviooai as much as it helps you. Deflect the routine, hand off the hard parts, and know what it costs before the month starts.
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