AI features and their cost¶
The AI Agent & Insights module adds three things that use Claude, Anthropic's AI model:
| Feature | Where | What is sent |
|---|---|---|
| Role agents | the Agent menu | A briefing for a role (finance, warehouse, sales…) written from that day's figures. |
| Attention window | the Home dashboard | A review of the checks the dashboard already runs, in plain sentences, with what to do first. |
| Read a document | Enter Sales Orders / Enter Purchase Orders › Import CSV… | A customer's order or a supplier's document that a user chooses to have read, turned into order lines to check before saving. |
The briefings and the dashboard send summaries only (counts, amounts, document numbers and item titles), never whole ledgers, customer lists or employee data. A document is sent only when a user asks for it to be read.
Without the module, none of this appears and no request is ever made, whatever keys are configured.
Who pays for it¶
There are two ways, and an administrator chooses under Setup › Plan & Licence:
Consoletium's key (the default). Usage is metered and appears on your Consoletium invoice. Your plan includes a monthly AI budget in US dollars; when it is used up the AI features pause until the 1st of the next month, and everything else carries on as normal.
Your company's own Anthropic key. If you have an account with Anthropic, paste your API key (it starts with sk-ant-) and click Use this key. From then on Anthropic bills you directly and Consoletium charges nothing for AI. The key is stored encrypted and never shown again; the screen shows only its last four characters. You can set your own monthly limit, or none. Stop using own key goes back to Consoletium's key and budget.
Seeing what it costs¶
The AI usage this month section shows:
- which key is in use and the month's budget;
- the spend on Consoletium's key and on your own key, separately;
- a line per feature: how many calls and what they cost.
Every call is counted, including ones that failed, so a run of errors is visible. The figures are in US dollars at Anthropic's published prices for the model used.
When the AI is unavailable¶
The screen that asked says why in a sentence: the module is not on the plan, no key is configured, the month's budget is used up, or Anthropic's service did not answer. If your own key is refused, check it under Setup › Plan & Licence; a key revoked at Anthropic stops working here at once.