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At Cal.com, you can send SMS and WhatsApp messages, as well as use our AI-powered phone agent, cal.ai, to keep attendees informed about bookings, reminders, and cancellations. While these messages can be funded through various methods (e.g., organization-level billing), credits are one of the available ways to manage usage—especially for teams and smaller accounts.

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Overview of Credits

Credits are used as a flexible payment method to send:
  • SMS messages (booking confirmations, reminders, updates)
  • WhatsApp messages (booking alerts, confirmations)
  • **Use Cal.ai **(AI-powered phone agent)
While many organization-level accounts may fund messaging centrally or directly via integrations like Twilio, credits serve as a prepaid way to power messaging, especially on smaller plans.

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Credit Allocation by Plan Type

The number of messaging credits available to your account depends on your plan type:

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Organizations (Enterprise)

  • 1000 credits per team member per month
  • Messaging costs are typically covered through your organization’s billing method
  • SMS/Whatsapp sending consumes credits (like on any other plan) and you can purchase more in your Organization billing settings.

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Team plan

  • 750 credits per team member per month
  • Credits reset at the start of each billing cycle
  • You can purchase more credits from Team Settings as needed.

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Free Users

  • No free credits included
  • You can purchase credits manually from your Billing Settings

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Behavior When Credit Balance Is Exhausted

  • Low credit alerts: We’ll send email warnings when your balance gets low (all admins are notified for teams)
  • Exhaustion fallback:
    • If credits run out, SMS/WhatsApp messages will automatically stop
    • Cal.com will fall back to email delivery only for affected messages
This ensures bookings still go through, but real-time alerts may be delayed if recipients rely on SMS/WhatsApp.
Credits are not the only way SMS/WhatsApp are funded — they’re just the default mechanism for smaller accounts and teams

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Messaging Credits

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Credit-Based Messaging Costs

The cost depends on the recipient’s location and the delivery method:

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🇺🇸 United States & 🇨🇦 Canada

  • SMS and WhatsApp messages are free on the Teams Plan in these regions
  • Credits are not deducted

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🌍 Other Countries

  • One credit = $0.01 USD
  • The total credit cost per message is based on:
    • Twilio’s region-specific SMS rates
    • A standard 80% processing fee
📌 Example: If Twilio charges $0.05 per SMS to India, your effective cost is: 
0.05 + (0.05 * 0.8) = $0.09 = 9 credits
You can check up-to-date Twilio pricing here: Twilio SMS Pricing

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Segment-Based Billing

Credits are charged per segment, not per message. Most SMS messages are broken into segments based on character count:
  • Standard segment: up to 160 characters
  • Messages with emojis or special characters: up to 70 characters per segment
Each segment is treated as a separate message, and credits are then calculated based on the information above. 📎 Want to check how many segments your message will use?
Use Twilio’s Segment Calculator to estimate credit usage before sending.

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Cal.ai

Cal.ai pricing is based on credits, with each call consuming a set number of credits based on its length. The cost is 29 credits per minute, which equals $0.29 per minute.

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AI agent credits

Credits can also be consumed by AI agent interactions through the Cal.com platform API. When you build or use AI agents that integrate with Cal.com, each completed interaction charges credits against your balance.

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How AI agent credits work

  • AI agent usage is tracked as a separate credit usage type (AI_AGENT) alongside SMS and Cal.ai phone calls
  • Credits are deducted from your monthly allocation or purchased balance, following the same priority as other credit types