Processing units, search queries and seats
Usage-based pricing has a bad reputation, and mostly it has earned it. The complaint is rarely the price — it is that nobody can predict the bill, and that the meter is invisible until the invoice arrives.
Here is exactly how dotDash charges, so you can work it out yourself.
A platform fee, then four meters
Each plan is a fixed monthly fee that includes an allotment of four things:
| Dimension | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Processing unit | Generative work: agent steps, model calls, document processing |
| Search query | Semantic, keyword and hybrid searches against your indexes |
| Storage | Documents, embeddings and conversation history at rest, per GiB-month |
| User seat | People with access |
Standard includes 200 processing units, 1,000 searches, 10 GiB and 5 seats. Professional includes 1,000, 10,000, 50 GiB and 25 seats. Enterprise includes 5,000, 50,000, 250 GiB and unlimited seats.
That is the whole meter. There is no per-API-call charge — a call that does generative work already bills a processing unit, and charging again for the request that carried it would be double-counting the thing the platform is for.
Going over bills; it does not block
This is the part worth being explicit about. If you exceed an allotment, the extra usage is added to that month's invoice at a published rate. Your workflows keep running.
We are deliberate about this. A metered limit that halts execution turns a billing event into an outage, and it always happens at the worst moment — the Monday morning report, the support queue at peak. The limits that are enforced are the structural ones: how many workspaces you get, how many workflows per workspace, whether a capability is on your plan. Those you can see and plan around. Usage you cannot always predict, so usage bills.
The rates
Overage falls as the plan rises: processing units run $1.00, $0.88 and $0.63 per unit across Standard, Professional and Enterprise; searches $2.50, $1.88 and $1.25 per thousand; storage $5.00, $4.38 and $3.75 per GiB-month; seats $38 and $31, with Enterprise seats unlimited and therefore never billable as overage.
Current figures are always on the pricing page.
Watching the meter
Usage is visible in-product as it accrues, broken down by dimension, for the period you are currently in. You should never have to wait for an invoice to learn what a workflow costs to run — and if a number surprises you, the execution history shows which runs produced it.
Trials and commitments
Every plan starts with a 14-day trial. A card is required to start it, which keeps the trial pool honest, and nothing is charged until it ends. Standard and Professional are month to month. Enterprise bills monthly on a one-year commitment — the commitment is a contract term, not a different billing cycle.
