Usage is the cost of the services Para uses to carry out your work. It draws from your organization’s prepaid usage balance. Seat subscriptions and usage are separate charges.
What uses your balance
An assignment can involve several kinds of work: reading and drafting, finding documents, extracting text, or preparing a finished file. The Usage page groups the reported costs into five categories.
| Category | What it covers |
|---|---|
| AI | AI processing and services such as transcription and document formatting. |
| Storage | Document services, including storage, text extraction (OCR), and search. This category covers more than simply keeping a file. |
| Compute | Computing resources used to carry out work. |
| Email services used to send messages. | |
| Other services | Reported costs that do not fit the categories above. |
Usage reflects the services used, rather than a fixed fee per message or page. A short request can still require substantial work—for example, “compare these agreements” may involve reading several long documents and preparing a detailed report.
Why one assignment costs more than another
- The amount of material matters: reviewing a long document collection generally requires more processing than summarizing a short excerpt.
- The work you ask for matters: research, transcription, and preparing several output formats can use different services.
- Follow-up requests and repeated assignments can use additional services. Check for a finished result before submitting the same work again.
- Scheduled assignments can consume usage even when you choose no notification. A quiet delivery setting does not make the underlying work free.
- The model matters. On Models, each model has a cost hint: Lightning, Balanced, or Frontier. Lightning models make the balance last longest and Frontier models cost the most. Standard seats always run Core Lightning.
Understand your balance
Usage shows reported costs for the current period, the same period Plan uses: the billing period on a paid plan and the calendar month on Enterprise. Owners and administrators see the whole organization; members see only what their own Para used. Use Plan to see the prepaid balance, top up, and review billing. A top-up adds funds to the shared balance; it is not a second charge for work already listed under Usage.
For example, if your prepaid balance is $20 and Para records $2 of additional usage, the remaining balance is $18, assuming no other usage or top-ups. This is an illustration of how the balance works, not a quoted price for an assignment.
Cost per assignment isn’t shown yet. Usage arrives as totals for each person and period, so an assignment’s page on Activity doesn’t list its own cost.
Control spending
- Give Para a focused brief: name the project, relevant documents, and output you need.
- Pause automations you no longer need on Automations.
- An administrator can manage on-demand usage, top-ups, automatic top-up, and the organization’s monthly spending limit on Plan. Administrators get an email when spending reaches 80% of that limit, and when the balance runs low with automatic top-up off.
- Administrators can set a spending limit for each person on Team. Members can see their own limit on Plan.
Para checks funding and applicable limits before starting new work. If your organization has no plan yet, your prepaid balance is empty, a subscription payment failed, or an applicable limit has been reached, new assignments are blocked until the billing issue is resolved. Para’s reply says why and includes a link to the Plan page, whether it arrives on Work, by email, or in Slack or Teams. These checks are not a live cutoff for work already in progress.
Why totals can change after work finishes
Usage is not a live meter. Some costs arrive after an assignment finishes, so the displayed total and remaining balance can update later. Check when usage was last confirmed before comparing numbers, and compare the same period. When Para hasn’t confirmed the latest costs, Usage and Plan say usage is still updating instead of showing $0. A missing total does not mean the work was free.