Essential Support’s AI features bill through your own provider account (Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google), so the only in-app cost control is a monthly spend cap on Instant Answers. This article covers that cap, the usage it reports, and how to scale AI back or off.
All settings below are under Settings → AI (owner-only).
The one built-in budget: Instant Answers
- Go to Settings → AI → Instant answers.
- Under Monthly budget, set Monthly cap (USD) — a whole number from 1 to 100, defaulting to 5 — and click Save.
- Below it, a running line shows this month’s totals: amount spent against the cap, how many tickets got an answered reply, how many were served from cache (a previously computed answer, no new AI call), and how many were skipped with no AI call at all because no help article plausibly matched.
- When spend reaches the cap, Instant Answers pauses for the rest of the month — a banner appears on this page, and tickets keep reaching your team as normal, just without an automated first reply. It resumes automatically next month, or immediately if you raise the cap.
- Two things keep Instant Answers cheap even before the cap is hit: a free keyword check runs before any AI call and skips the call entirely when nothing plausibly matches (counted as “skipped with no AI call” in the usage line), and a matched answer can be served again from cache for a repeat question without a new call.
Ticket translation and AI triage have no dollar cap
- Neither ticket translation nor AI triage (auto-type / auto-priority) — both under Settings → AI → AI features — has an owner-facing spend cap. Each runs per-message, bounded only by internal message-length limits, for as long as its toggle is on.
- AI triage additionally caps itself per ticket, to a fixed number of classification passes over the ticket’s lifetime, so a very long or repeatedly edited thread can’t run away — but this isn’t a dollar figure and isn’t shown in Settings.
- To control their cost, use the toggles themselves rather than a budget: uncheck Enable ticket translation, or either AI triage checkbox, under Settings → AI → AI features.
Turning AI off
- Turn off one feature at a time: uncheck Turn on instant answers for new tickets (Instant answers tab), or Enable ticket translation / the two AI triage checkboxes (AI features tab). Each takes effect immediately.
- Remove all help articles (Instant answers tab → Remove all articles) — this also turns Instant Answers off automatically, since it would have nothing to answer from.
- Remove your provider’s saved key: on the AI features tab, select the provider and click Remove key, then Save. With no key saved — and no platform fallback key configured — every AI feature that depends on it (translation, triage, Instant Answers, and the in-ticket draft-reply and summarize buttons) stops working, even though a toggle may still show as checked in Settings.
- There’s no single “AI off” master switch. Turning off the individual toggles above is the supported way to stop each feature on its own; removing the key is the way to stop all of them at once without changing your other settings.
Privacy: whichever features are on, message content only ever goes to the AI provider you’ve connected — plus OpenAI specifically for search-embedding indexing, where semantic (smart) matching is available for Instant Answers. See “Connect an AI provider” for what each feature sends and when.