Free beta usage and the shared budget

Chab's full provider toolkit is available to anonymous and registered free users when the particular operation is healthy, authorized and within its allowance. Private Mail, Drive and account administration still require their own account authorization. Free does not mean unlimited: your promotional credits, request limits and operation limits still apply.

All Chab-funded free provider work shares a €10 rolling 24-hour upstream-cost budget. Paying customers using their own paid credits are not charged against this promotional budget. The cap is separate from the credits shown in your account: an upstream provider can charge Chab even when Chab waives your charge. Operator-funded health checks have a separate capped allowance; they do not use the cash allowance set aside for public free users.

Before each actual provider HTTP request, Chab reserves a conservative cash allowance. Separate requests for translation refinement, structured-output repair, keyword/domain fan-out, browser fallback and retries each consume an allowance. Starting a request, cancelling it or deleting a guest identity cannot reset the allowance. Confirmed synchronous outcomes and definitive rejections remain counted for 24 hours after their response. A valid provider cost receipt can reduce the cash reservation to its confirmed cost. Missing or ambiguous responses and unfinished background work remain counted until their particular provider task has a confirmed terminal outcome or receives an audited review. Successful later retries do not clear an earlier uncertain request. After at least seven days, an operator may document an uncertain cash write-off if no operation is active. That does not invent a provider receipt or automatically settle a customer's credit hold.

When no allowance remains, the operation cannot issue another paid provider request. Free starts may pause or an in-progress multi-step operation may stop. Try again later or use a smaller request. If you already have an eligible paid-funded account, you can sign in and use its paid credits; new account registration and checkout are paused in this beta. The operator can also pause all free paid-provider requests without pausing paid customer work. Local file conversion does not incur a paid upstream request.

Request boundaries

Free LLM and translation requests use price-filtered, non-fallback model routes with explicit output-token limits. Only the documented Chab model routes are admitted; an unknown or changed paid provider cannot silently bypass the cash guard. Free deep research has a provider-enforced maximum of two tool calls and 8,192 generated tokens, including reasoning. This is a small beta research run, not an unrestricted research task. Paid requests retain their separate credit and operation limits.

The cash allowances include a fee/tax/exchange-rate cushion. Text requests use conservative input bounds, explicit completion/reasoning limits and provider price filters. Free research reserves €2.10 against its bounded beta model/context/tool/output limits. Other provider calls reserve conservative upper allowances against bounded tasks/results/sessions. These are safety allowances, not your prices or promised actual costs. Chab does not guess uncertain costs or replenish the cash budget from refunded customer credits.

If cash admission refuses every provider request in an accepted operation, the operation fails with promotional_budget_exhausted and releases its unused credit reservation. If any earlier request was dispatched, including a previous attempt or a fallback inside the same attempt, its uncertain cost remains held until reconciliation; the later budget refusal does not erase that liability.

Your client, browser session or OAuth connection also has its own access and spending limits. A connection to someone else's personal data never becomes available just because a promotional budget exists.