Credits and rate limits
Most of what Sonora does costs nothing to run again and again: querying your own meetings, product usage, support history, and notes is free, no matter how often agents, chat, or actions read them. Credits exist for the work that has a real outside cost — reaching out to third-party data providers and the public web. Credits are how Sonora meters that work against your plan.
What a credit measures
Section titled “What a credit measures”A credit is a unit of external work. Reading your own data inside Sonora is always free; a credit is only spent when an agent or builder reaches outside your workspace.
| Work | Relative cost |
|---|---|
| Querying your own data — meetings, product usage, issues, emails, notes, engagement | Free |
| A web search step inside an agent run | Standard |
| Looking up a person or company from an external data provider | Higher |
Every agent run that does any external work costs at least one credit, even a small one. A run that only reads your internal data costs nothing. So a health agent scoring an account from meetings and usage is free, while a contact-enrichment agent that finds a LinkedIn profile and current title pulls from an outside provider and spends credits.
You don’t manage credits per run. You write the agent, choose its data sources, and Sonora meters whatever it ends up doing.
Reading your usage
Section titled “Reading your usage”The sidebar shows a credit chip: how many credits you’ve used this period against your plan’s allowance, and the date the count resets. The chip changes color as you approach the allowance, so heavy usage is visible before it becomes a surprise.
Usage resets every billing period on your contract anniversary day. If your anniversary is the 15th, each period runs from the 15th of one month to the 15th of the next, and the count starts over each time. Spent credits don’t roll over, and unused credits don’t carry forward.
What happens near your allowance
Section titled “What happens near your allowance”Credits meter usage; they don’t switch features off mid-run. As you approach or pass your plan’s allowance the chip reflects it, and your account team will reach out to right-size the plan. If you have a one-off need — backfilling enrichment across thousands of records, say — talk to your account team first so we can plan for the run rather than have it surprise the meter.
Rate limits
Section titled “Rate limits”Separate from credits, a few limits keep usage steady and costs predictable.
Agent runs are throttled per workspace. Agents run continuously across your whole book, but Sonora caps how many run at once for a given workspace. Day-to-day this is invisible; it only matters for bulk operations, which is another reason to flag large backfills to your account team ahead of time.
The API is rate-limited per access token. If you connect Sonora over MCP, each access token is limited to 60 requests per minute. Past that, calls return Rate limit exceeded. Retry after Xs. until the window resets. Spacing out requests or backing off on that message keeps a client well under the limit.