How do Credits work across storage, syncing, and profile enrichment?

Credits are the unit Bread & Butter uses to pay for the work that happens after a lead is captured. Capturing a visitor, tracking their journey and scoring them costs nothing. What costs credits is keeping their profile once your plan's allowance is full, pushing their Intelligence Brief into your CRM, the research that turns an email address into that Brief, answering the questions you ask about your data in your AI assistant, and going out to find matched prospects: net-new people who look like your best customers.

In short: Credits are a Pro feature; Pro includes 3,000 a month and the Scale Credits add-on brings another 10,000 a month. They pay for five things. Storage is flat and monthly: Pro includes 5,000 profiles, and each profile beyond that costs 2 credits a month for as long as it is stored. Profiles can't be deleted to save on storage, because every one, good or bad, is part of what your Ideal Customer Profile learns from. Free includes 200 profiles and no credits, so 200 is the ceiling until you upgrade. Syncing is flat: the basic contact sync of name, email address and profile link never costs credits, and pushing a full Intelligence Brief into your CRM is 3 credits per Brief, however many destinations receive it. Enrichment is variable, priced like a taxi meter, because the research effort differs from lead to lead: easy matches cost little, corporate domains generally cost more because the company research always happens rather than being a maybe, and hard-to-verify "ghosts" cost the most. Questions you ask your AI assistant through the Bread & Butter MCP server cost 3 credits each, plus 1 credit for every 10 rows in the answer, and more when they reach far back in time; at the Scale Credits rate that is less than a third of what HubSpot charges for its cheapest AI action. Finding matched prospects is flat plus research: 100 credits to source each one and prepare its draft, then the normal enrichment cost on top. When credits run low they are always spent in the same order on every account: storage first, then syncing, then enrichment, then AI assistant questions, with finding matched prospects last. Capture never stops, and integrations never go quiet: one set to the Intelligence Brief or Stream keeps sending every new lead with their name, email address and a notice to add Bread & Butter credits in place of the research. Research that couldn't run is queued, and runs as soon as you add credits within your current billing period. Anything still queued at the end of the period is dropped.

What a Credit Is, and Where They Come From

A credit is a fixed unit of work. The Pro plan includes 3,000 credits a month, renewed at the start of each billing cycle. If you need more, the Scale Credits add-on gives you another 10,000 credits a month, and you can stack as many as your traffic needs. Credits added part way through a billing period go to work immediately, starting with anything waiting in the queue. Your included credits, your balance and the price of additional credits are all shown inside the app, on the Billing tab under Accounts. Pricing can vary by plan and by partner.

The Free plan includes no credits, and credits cannot be added to it. Profile enrichment, Intelligence Brief syncing, storage beyond the included profiles, AI assistant questions and everything else in this article are Pro features. On Free you get unlimited traffic and visitors, 200 stored profiles, and the basic contact sync; to go past 200 profiles, you upgrade to Pro.

Your balance, and a running record of how it is being spent, are under Accounts in the left-hand menu, on the Billing tab. Each captured lead also shows what its own research cost, so you can always see which profile cost what and why.

The Five Things Credits Pay For

	How it is metered	What it costs
Storing profiles	Flat, per profile beyond your allowance, every month	Pro includes 5,000 profiles, then 2 credits a month for each additional profile. Free includes 200 with no way to add more; upgrading to Pro lifts the ceiling.
Syncing to your CRM	Flat, per Intelligence Brief generated	The basic contact sync (first name, last name, email address, profile link) never costs credits; which destinations a plan can send it to is set by the plan. A full Intelligence Brief costs 3 credits each time one is generated, and one charge covers every destination it goes to. The Intelligence Stream is part of an Enterprise license.
Profile enrichment	Variable, by research effort	On average 25 to 250 credits per profile, depending on how hard the person is to find and whether there is a company to research. The rest of this article explains why.
Questions in your AI assistant (MCP)	Variable, by the size of the answer	3 credits per question, plus 1 credit for every 10 rows in the answer. Questions that reach further back in time cost more.
Matched prospects	Flat per prospect, plus research	100 credits to source each matched prospect and prepare its outreach draft, plus the ordinary enrichment cost of researching that person and their company.

Storage and syncing are entirely predictable. If you know how many profiles you hold and how many Briefs you generate, you know what they will cost. Enrichment is the one worth understanding, AI assistant questions cost what you ask for, and finding matched prospects is the one you switch on deliberately.

Storage

On Pro, nothing is deleted or trimmed when you pass 5,000. Every profile is kept and your history stays complete; storage simply starts drawing credits.

Storage is charged every month, not once. Each profile beyond your 5,000 costs 2 credits a month for as long as it is stored, and the count is recalculated each month. An account holding 6,000 profiles is 1,000 over, so storage uses 2,000 credits that month, and the same again the next month if the count hasn't changed.

A few things to know:

Only profiles with an email address count. Visitors who haven't converted are tracked and scored, but they aren't stored profiles and never count towards the 5,000.
Scale Credits add credits, not storage. Each add-on block gives you 10,000 more credits a month. It doesn't raise the 5,000 included profiles; it pays for the profiles above it.
Storage is paid first. When credits run low, storage is the first thing they go to, because nothing else works without the profiles.

On a high-volume account storage can become a meaningful share of monthly usage, which is worth knowing when you see a recommendation to top up.

Why profiles can't be deleted

Once storage starts costing credits, deleting old or poor leads can look like an easy saving. Bread & Butter doesn't allow it, because every profile is part of what your Ideal Customer Profile learns from.

The good profiles show what a buyer looks like. The bad ones show what a buyer doesn't look like: the leads that went nowhere, the wrong industry, the contacts you ruled out. Take the bad ones away and the model only sees half the picture. Traits your non-buyers share start to look neutral, Focused Score drifts towards the wrong visitors, and the matched prospects we find start to resemble leads you already rejected.

Keeping everything, good and bad, is what lets the ICP keep sharpening over time. If a lead is wrong for you, move it to the right stage instead: Dead / Do Not Contact for a real person who is disqualified, Spam / Bad Email for a fake one. It leaves your Focused Tab and Nurture queue, it's never contacted again, and the model keeps learning from it. How do Lead Stages work? has the detail.

Syncing

Every conversion sends the basic contact record with no credits involved: first name, last name, email address and a link back to the profile. That is the List tier, and it never draws on your balance at any destination. Which destinations you can send it to is a matter of plan rather than credits: on Free that is CSV export, Google Sheets, Mailchimp and Slack, while sending the List into a CRM is a Pro feature. Integrations and Automation lists every destination and what each plan can reach.

The Intelligence Brief is different. Generating one and pushing it into the CRM record costs 3 credits per Brief. The charge is on generation, not on delivery, so a Brief that goes to your CRM, a Slack channel and an inbox on the same session close is one charge, not three. When a known lead returns and their Brief is refreshed, that refresh is a new generation and a new charge.

Questions in your AI assistant (MCP)

With the Bread & Butter MCP server connected to your AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT or any assistant that supports MCP), you can ask questions about your own data in plain language and get the answer straight from your account: which leads converted today, which sources brought the most Focused visitors last quarter, how a campaign compares with last year. Each question draws credits based on how much it asks of your data, because a quick look at today and a search through years of history are very different amounts of work.

3 credits per question, however small.
Plus 1 credit for every 10 rows in the answer.
History costs more. Questions about the last 90 days are charged at the normal rate, questions reaching back up to a year at twice the rate, and anything older than a year at five times the rate.

Some examples:

"Show me the 10 leads that converted today" is 3 credits plus 1 for the 10 rows: 4 credits.
"What were my top 25 referrers in the last 90 days?" is 3 plus 3: 6 credits.
"What was my top referrer on every Tuesday for the last six years?" returns 312 rows reaching more than a year back, so it is charged at five times the rate: about 175 credits.

The ready-made reports you run in your AI assistant work the same way. A report covering today costs less than the same report covering the last five years.

How this compares. At the Scale Credits add-on rate, an AI assistant question costs less than a third of what HubSpot charges for its cheapest AI action. The current price of the Scale Credits add-on is shown inside the app, on the Billing tab under Accounts.

To keep answers fast for every customer, each account has a limit on the number of rows returned in a single answer and on the credits questions can use in an hour. AI assistant questions are a Pro feature.

Matched prospects

Matched prospects are the outbound side of the product. Bread & Butter learns your Ideal Customer Profile from your own pipeline and goes out to find net-new people who match it, people who have never visited your site. Each arrives with a Match Score showing how closely they fit.

Each prospect costs 100 credits to source and to prepare the outreach draft that travels with them. The research on that person and their company is then charged as ordinary Profile Enrichment, at the variable rates explained below.

The research is not an optional extra on top of the prospect. It is how we know the prospect is worth sending you.

A name and an email address out of a database proves nothing. The research is what establishes the person's actual role, the company they work for, its industry and size, and whether any of that genuinely matches the profile of your best customers. Without it we would be handing you a contact and inviting you to find out for yourself, which is the thing this feature exists to replace.

So a prospect is never delivered unresearched. If the research cannot confirm the match, the prospect does not reach your account and you are not charged for it. The charge is per prospect that arrives, fully researched, with its draft ready.

Prospects arrive a few at a time rather than as a bulk import, which keeps the spend steady and visible rather than landing as one large bill.

What Enrichment Actually Researches

To see why enrichment cannot be a flat rate, it helps to know what the research is. Profile Enrichment does not stop at finding a social media link. It builds a complete picture for your sales team:

Individual context: the person's name, current role, recent promotions, publications, and public touchpoints such as skills, hobbies and volunteer causes.
Company intelligence: the organisation's market positioning, core offerings, recent launches, funding, corporate donations and key leadership for multi-threading.
Timely sales hooks: recent press, news and awards, for the person or the company, to give your reps a real opener.
Journey synthesis: connecting that external footprint to what the person did on your site, so the Brief reads as one story rather than a profile stapled to a pageview list.

Why Enrichment Costs Vary

Some people have a wide public footprint and some do not, so the compute needed to research them varies. It works like a taxi meter: the harder the engine has to work, the more credits are used. There are three cases.

1. Rapid matches: the fewest credits

If a person has an easily accessible footprint, the profile comes together almost immediately. Minimal effort, very few credits.

2. Deep searches: more credits

If a person is hard to find, the engine does not give up. It queries alternate databases, local records, news sites and professional registries until it has a confident match. The more sources it has to work through, the more credits it uses.

3. Ghosts: the most credits

Occasionally a lead submits an email address with no digital footprint at all, or the data is so conflicting, thousands of people with the same name, say, that no single identity can be confirmed. These empty profiles often cost the most, which surprises people.

Proving a negative is expensive. To establish that a lead does not exist online, or that the data is too ambiguous to trust, the engine has to exhaust every available vector, which can take up to 30 minutes of continuous processing. We prioritise accuracy over filling fields, so the engine will never guess to make a profile look complete. And an empty, verified result is still useful: it means your reps do not spend 30 minutes of their own day hunting the same ghost.

Why Corporate Email Domains Cost More, and Why That Is Good News

Across an account, this is usually the biggest factor in what enrichment costs, and the expensive outcome is also the better one.

A corporate domain means the company research always happens. A free-mail address only sometimes leads to it.

The engine always tries to research two subjects: the person, and the organisation they work for. With a Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo address, the domain gives us nothing to start from. Often the person's public footprint still tells us where they work, and when it does we research that company exactly as we would from a work address: size, industry, positioning, funding, launches, press and leadership, connected back to the person and their role. But sometimes the footprint does not lead to an employer, and the research stops at the individual.

With a corporate domain there is no maybe. The domain names the organisation, so the company research always happens. That is why, generally speaking, an account capturing mostly corporate domains spends more per lead than one capturing mostly free-mail addresses at the same volume: not because a free-mail address is always cheaper, but because a corporate one is always the full job.

What the extra spend buys. A richer profile, yes, but more importantly the raw material your Ideal Customer Profile is built from. An ICP is a description of the kind of organisation that buys from you: size, industry, growth stage, geography, buying triggers. A profile with no company attached can tell Focused Score how the person behaved on your site, which matters, but it cannot tell the model what kind of business they came from. Every capture that resolves to a company adds a data point to the picture of who your buyers are, and when you mark a deal Won/Closed the model learns from the company as well as the journey.

This compounds. More captures with a company behind them means better firmographic coverage, a sharper ICP, more accurate scoring, and a sales team that prioritises better. The cost is higher at the front and the return is a model that gets more useful every month.

It is also a signal on its own. A high share of corporate domains usually means your marketing is reaching people at work, evaluating you on company time under their real work identity. That is what a healthy B2B funnel looks like. A mix that is heavily free-mail is worth a look for its own sake: it can mean your content is attracting the wrong audience, or that people are not yet willing to give you their work address.

A higher enrichment bill driven by corporate domains is not a problem to solve. It is what a good funnel costs.

Reading Your Usage

Because the cost per search varies, we show you exactly where credits went. On each captured lead you will see the credit cost of that search alongside a status badge explaining it:

Profile Found (Low Credits): rapid match completed.
Profile Found (High Credits): deep search was needed to locate the footprint and sales hooks.
No Footprint Verified (Highest Credits): exhaustive search completed; no footprint exists, or the data was too ambiguous to confirm.

Why Your Monthly Total Stays Predictable

No single lead's enrichment cost is knowable in advance, but most businesses see a consistent mix of easy and hard matches, and a consistent mix of corporate and free-mail domains, because their traffic and audience do not change dramatically week to week. After a billing cycle or two that mix averages into a stable number. Your total enrichment spend becomes a reliable line to plan around even though the per-lead cost never is.

Your first 30 days give you an observed baseline rather than a guess. By the end of your trial you will know roughly how many profiles you add and what your mix looks like, and can decide from real numbers whether to keep everything running or scale back.

When Credits Run Low

Credits are always spent in the same order, on every account:

Storing captured profiles. Nothing else is possible without them.
Syncing Intelligence Briefs to your CRM.
Profile Enrichment.
AI assistant questions (MCP).
Finding matched prospects, with whatever is left.

AI assistant questions come after the research, so asking questions about your data never slows down capture, syncing or the research on new leads. When there are no credits left for a question, your assistant tells you and links you to adding credits.

Finding matched prospects is last deliberately. It is the one thing here that depends on everything above it: it can only find people who resemble your best customers once the research on those customers is complete. Sourcing new prospects against a half-finished profile would spend credits to produce worse targets. Everything above it keeps your own pipeline working, so if something has to stop, this is the right thing to stop first.

This order is the same on every account and is not something you configure.

What keeps running. Everything that does not cost credits. Visitors are still tracked, forms still convert, every step of every journey is still recorded, and every integration keeps sending new leads. An integration set to the Intelligence Brief or Intelligence Stream keeps sending the same Brief or Stream, with the lead's name and email address filled in, the researched details left empty, and a one-line notice to add Bread & Butter credits in their place. Your CRM stays current and nothing downstream breaks. The integration's status shows Sent: out of Bread & Butter credits. Focused Score and your Focused Ratio keep working, though while enrichment is paused they lean on on-site behaviour alone rather than behaviour plus profile fit, so ICP matching is less precise than usual. You still see who is engaging most; you see less of who resembles your best customers.

What pauses. The research, AI assistant questions, and finding matched prospects.

Queued research runs within your billing period. Research that couldn't run is queued rather than skipped. Add credits with a Scale Credits add-on before your billing period ends and the engine goes back through the whole queue, so your ICP catches up rather than having a gap in it. When your billing period ends, anything still queued is dropped, and your renewed credits go to the new period's leads.

The add-on recommendation is for a full month. When you run out, Bread & Butter recommends a monthly add-on based on your recent usage, sized for a full billing period so the same thing doesn't happen next month. If research is waiting in the queue, an add-on bought part way through a period is charged and granted in full rather than prorated, so there are enough credits to clear the queue and keep researching new leads for the rest of the period. The credits go to work straight away, starting with the queue.

AI assistant questions and finding matched prospects don't queue. A question that couldn't run can simply be asked again once credits are added. Matched prospects stop sourcing until enrichment is running again, because a prospect found against a stale profile is not worth having.

A Note on Accuracy

The research engine is powerful, but it is not flawless. Because it synthesises live, unstructured data from across the open web, it can occasionally hit outdated source information or misread context. We recommend your reps give the generated insights a quick read before sending anything, the same way they would check any research done on their behalf. The Brief is designed to accelerate the work, not to replace a human glance before the send button.