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, and going out to find net-new prospects 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 four things. Storage is flat: Pro includes 5,000 profiles and each profile beyond that costs 2 credits. 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 or Stream update into your CRM is a small fixed charge 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. Prospect AI is flat plus research: 100 credits to source each net-new prospect 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, with Prospect AI last. Capture never stops, the basic contact sync never stops, and anything that could not be researched or pushed is held for up to 30 days and processed as soon as credits are added.

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 mid-cycle go to work immediately, including on anything waiting in the queue. Current plan and add-on pricing is on the pricing page.

The Free plan includes no credits, and credits cannot be added to it. Profile enrichment, Intelligence Brief syncing, storage beyond the included profiles 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 Four Things Credits Pay For

	How it is metered	What it costs
Storing profiles	Flat, per profile beyond your allowance	Pro includes 5,000 profiles, then 2 credits per 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 update is a small fixed charge each time one is generated, and one charge covers every destination it goes to. The current rate is on the pricing page. The Intelligence Stream also runs on credits, at a rate negotiated as part of an Enterprise agreement.
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.
Prospect AI	Flat per prospect, plus research	100 credits to source each net-new 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 are adding a month, you know what they will cost. Enrichment is the one worth understanding, and Prospect AI 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 2 credits per additional profile. On a high-volume account this can become a meaningful share of monthly usage, which is worth knowing when you see a recommendation to top up.

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 is a small flat charge per Brief; the current rate is on the pricing page. 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.

Prospect AI

Prospect AI is the outbound side of the product. It 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 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.
Prospect AI, with whatever is left.

Prospect AI 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 the basic contact sync of name and email address still goes out. 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, any Intelligence Brief or Stream pushes, and Prospect AI sourcing. The research and the pushes are held rather than skipped. Add credits, whether the monthly renewal or a Scale Credits add-on, within 30 days and the engine goes back through the whole queue: held research runs, held Briefs and Stream updates are delivered, and your ICP catches up rather than having a gap in it. Anything still waiting after 30 days is dropped rather than delivered stale. Prospect AI is different: it does not queue, it simply stops 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.