Your Agency Balance is the only running cost of your business on Climbo beyond your own plan. It covers exactly two things: the SMS and WhatsApp messages your clients send, and the AI tokens consumed by AI features. This article explains the rates, how to price your plans around them, and how to monitor and top up your balance. It starts at $5 when your agency is created, and upgrading to White Label adds $50.
Pricing Your Plans to Cover It
The Principle
Since you sell the platform through monthly or annual subscriptions, the price you set for each plan is what covers these costs — and then some. As explained in the Plan Limits article, every plan has a Total spending cap: the absolute maximum each location on the plan could cost you in a month if it used every message and AI token the plan provides. We recommend pricing a plan at at least 10 times its spending cap per location, so that every location stays comfortably profitable even in the worst case.
Messaging Costs: SMS and WhatsApp
What Costs What
Emails are always free, in every country. SMS and WhatsApp aren't — and what they cost depends on the recipient's country, not yours. The Available Balance section shows the exact cost per SMS and per WhatsApp message for every country. There you can also mark a Preferred Destination, used as the basis for your spending cap calculations — useful if most of your clients' customers are in one country. For example, in the United States one SMS costs $0.01 and one WhatsApp message costs $0.03. Prices are always shown rounded up to the next cent, and a country with no published rate is charged at $0.10.
A Detail That Matters: SMS Are Billed Per Part
The per-country price is the price of one SMS part, not of one message. A message longer than a single SMS, or one containing emoji and special characters, is split into several parts and costs a multiple of the listed price. Long templates are therefore more expensive than they look — worth keeping in mind when you set a plan's SMS limit.
Building a Plan Around It
When you build a plan, you set a monthly message limit, see the resulting spending cap (based on your Preferred Destination), and price the plan comfortably above it.
AI Token Costs
How AI Is Priced
AI tokens are priced the same everywhere in the world — there's no country dimension. Tokens sent to the AI model and tokens it writes back are charged separately, and the ones it writes back cost considerably more. For planning purposes the interface shows you a single blended rate of $6.60 per 1 million tokens, which assumes a typical mix of the two. Your real cost per million usually comes out a little below that, because repeated context is charged at a reduced rate.
Estimates Per Feature
Each AI feature has an estimated token cost, shown in the AI Pricing popup when you set a plan's AI token limit. These are averages based on historical usage; what's actually deducted is always measured from the real usage of each action.
- AI Review Reply — 2,250 tokens (≈$0.015)
- AI Social Caption — 1,700 tokens (≈$0.011)
- AI Blog Strategy — 12,450 tokens (≈$0.082)
- AI Blog Cover — 1,550 tokens (≈$0.043)
- AI Blog Article — 10,150 tokens (≈$0.067)
- AI Ranking (Perplexity) — 1,300 tokens (≈$0.008)
- AI Ranking (Grok) — 19,800 tokens (≈$0.130)
- AI Ranking (ChatGPT) — 12,850 tokens (≈$0.085)
- AI Ranking (Gemini) — 6,000 tokens (≈$0.039)
- AI Ranking Total — 39,900 tokens (≈$0.263)
- AI Sentiment Analysis — 8,400 tokens (≈$0.055)
- AI Chat Title — 800 tokens (≈$0.005)
- AI Chat Message — 3,450 tokens (≈$0.023)
Why the Blog Cover Costs More Than Its Tokens
Generating a blog cover is an image, not text, so on top of its tokens it carries a small fixed charge of $0.033 per image. That's why its estimated cost is higher than its token count alone would suggest.
The Usage Simulator
In the same AI Pricing popup, the Usage simulator estimates the monthly AI token usage of a single location. Enter how many AI review replies, social captions, blog posts and chat messages you expect, and switch on AI Ranking and AI Sentiment Analysis if the plan includes them. The estimated total tells you roughly what token limit to set and what it could cost you. Note that the simulator counts the blog strategy once regardless of how many articles you enter, and doesn't include the fixed image charge for covers.
Monitoring Your Balance
Available Balance
At the top of Settings > Balance, Available Balance shows how much money you currently have. The figure changes color as it falls — green above $50, amber above $20, red below that — so a red balance is your cue to top up.
Monthly Usage
Further down, Monthly Usage shows your total spend across all clients for a chosen month (for example, $47 in June 2026). Next to it, Aggregated Usage compares how many SMS, emails, WhatsApp messages and AI tokens your clients actually used with what their plans allotted. For instance, if your clients collectively had 500 SMS available for the month and used 250, you'll see that 50% of the provided volume was used.
Clients Usage
Clients Usage breaks usage down per client, with a row for each of their locations, and per month, with filters for both, so you can see exactly what each client costs you. For example, a location might show 18 of its 500 provided SMS used (costing $0.18), 18 emails used (free), 4 WhatsApp messages sent, and 44,000 of its 500,000 provided AI tokens used (costing $0.29).
Who Can See It
Balance is available to an Owner and to an Admin; Staff members don't see it. An Admin can read everything on the page but can't top up: Add Funds opens an Add Funds dialog that reads "To add funds to your balance, please contact your account owner at", followed by your email address.
What the Balance Actually Pays For
Our Own Costs
Your Agency Balance is the only place usage costs are charged, and they're simply what we pay our infrastructure partners on your behalf: Bird.com for SMS, email and WhatsApp delivery, and the AI providers behind each feature — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and Perplexity, depending on which model the feature uses.
Adding Funds
Topping Up
Click Add Funds to top up (minimum $50). A Stripe checkout opens in a new tab, where you can add a larger amount if you'd rather not top up often. Funds are credited to your balance as soon as the payment goes through.
If You Have a Discount on Top-Ups
If your agency has an agreed discount on the top-up price, your balance is credited the full list amount, not the reduced figure you actually paid. The discount is a discount on the price, not a smaller top-up.
Billing Information Is Required First
A top-up needs valid billing information and a valid billing address on your account. Without them the checkout can't be created: you get the Billing Information Required dialog ("To add funds to your balance, please provide your billing information in the Billing section.") with a Go to Billing button, so fill these in before you actually need funds. See the Billing & Invoices article.
Low Balance Warnings
We email you when your balance crosses below $5, and again at $2 and $1, so you have a chance to top up before you run out. The email goes to the Owner's address. With your billing information complete it carries a direct top-up link; without it the email still arrives and links to your own Balance page instead, where you fill in the details and start the top-up — so an incomplete billing profile no longer means hearing nothing at all. There's no automatic recharge: topping up is always something you do yourself, which is why it's worth acting on the first warning rather than the last.
What Happens at Zero Balance
The Effect on Your Clients
If your balance runs out, your clients can no longer send SMS or WhatsApp messages, and AI features stop working. Emails keep working, since they're free. Clients just see a generic error. They don't know about your Agency Balance, so from their side it looks like the platform is broken.
Scheduled Campaigns Are Not Retried
A campaign that was scheduled to go out while your balance is empty isn't held and retried later: it ends with an "insufficient balance" error and has to be set up again. This is the most costly consequence of an empty balance, because your client loses a send they had planned.
A Small Negative Balance Is Possible
Costs are deducted after a message is sent or an AI action completes, so the last action can push the balance slightly below zero. AI features stop as soon as the balance is negative.
Controlling Cost with Feature Toggles
Turning Features Off
Beyond setting message and token limits, you can control cost by disabling entire features on a plan. On the messaging side, you can disable SMS or WhatsApp entirely, leaving clients with email only for review requests, which costs you nothing. On the AI side, you can enable or disable each AI feature individually: the AI Chat, AI Sentiment Analysis, the SEO Agent, AI Ranking, the GEO Agent, the Social Agent, and so on. A disabled feature simply can't consume tokens or generate cost on that plan.
A Worked Example: Bronze, Silver, Gold
Three Tiers
Here's how this plays out across a typical three-tier structure:
- Bronze — AI Chat, WhatsApp, and the GEO Agent all disabled, with modest limits: 50 SMS, 150 emails, and 100,000 AI tokens a month.
- Spending cap: $2
- Price: $99/month
- Silver — AI Chat and WhatsApp enabled, GEO Agent still disabled, with higher limits than Bronze.
- Spending cap: $6
- Price: $149/month
- Gold — every feature enabled, including AI Chat, WhatsApp, and the GEO Agent, with the highest limits of the three.
- Spending cap: $15
- Price: $199/month
What to Notice
On every tier, the price sits well above its spending cap — roughly 13 to 50 times over — so every single location is highly profitable, even in the worst case where it uses 100% of what's provided. In practice, since clients rarely use everything available to them, your real margin is usually even better than this worst-case math suggests.
What Your Clients See
Their Own Limits
Clients can check their own usage in the Limits section of their settings: for each location, what's been provided versus used this month for SMS, email, WhatsApp and AI tokens, resetting on the 1st (see the Limits & Billing article in Client Mode). For example, a client with 100 WhatsApp messages provided and 15 already used will see 85 remaining. Their History section lets them review every individual message sent, and the AI tab of that same History section shows how many tokens each AI action consumed — for instance, seeing that one AI review reply used 2,250 tokens.