Credits: one balance for your texts and pictures

Slotora itself is free. Two things inside it are not: the text messages you send your clients and the pictures the AI draws for you. Both come out of one balance, counted in credits. You buy credits when you want them, they sit there until something uses them, and there is no subscription and no monthly fee attached to them.

What each thing takes

What credits do not pay for

The AI phone receptionist is not on this balance. Her minutes are bought as their own prepaid pack — 100 minutes at a fixed price in your own currency — under Nita (AI) → Phone receptionist, and a call never touches your credits. See 'The phone receptionist: answering while both hands are busy'. Nothing else in Slotora uses credits at all: the calendar, your booking page, the client book, the reports and taking payments are all included.

A text is the only thing with more than one price

Everything else is one number in every market, because our own cost is one number. A text is nearly one number too: the network charges us the same for Britain, Ireland, Hungary and Romania, and about half of that for Poland, so Poland is the one market with a price of its own rather than an average that would quietly make one country pay for another. It is the country the message goes to that decides, not where your salon is — so a Polish salon texting a British client pays the British price. Your own market's figure is on the Credits page, above the packs, and that is the figure you are actually charged.

Topping up

Credits are bought under Credits in your admin menu, on a computer or an Android phone. There are four packs — 100, 200, 500 and 1000 credits — and the bigger the pack the cheaper the credit, with what one credit works out at printed under each one. Payment is a one-off card charge through Stripe in your own currency, and the new balance is on the screen when you come back. There is no minimum and nothing recurring.

On an iPhone

In the iPhone app the Credits screen shows your balance and what everything costs, and no packs. Apple's App Store rules do not allow us to sell credits inside an iPhone app, or to point at another way of buying them, so that part of the screen is not there at all rather than greyed out. Nothing is hidden from you: the balance and the price list are the same numbers as everywhere else.

Credits do not expire

A credit you have bought stays on the balance until something uses it. There is no monthly expiry and no use-it-or-lose-it date. What a thing costs in credits can change, and the rule is deliberately not symmetrical: a price can come down the day we decide it, and a price can only go up 30 days after the owners have been told. That is enforced in the software rather than promised here — an increase written with a shorter notice is held to the 30 days anyway.

The SMS balance you had before credits

Credits replace the separate SMS balance, and an SMS balance from before them is carried across at the price of one text in your own market: one old credit becomes what one text costs you now. The figure on the screen changes; the number of texts it will send does not. Where the arithmetic does not come out evenly it is rounded up rather than down, so nobody ends up with fewer texts than they had, and where the old rate was not a whole number of texts some salons end up with slightly more.

When it runs low, and if it runs out