What exactly counts against the included AI?

The billed dollar cost of metered requests counts against your allowance, pooled account-wide and drained before your prepaid balance.

The billed cost of metered requests — the same number the dashboard meter and your usage ledger show, measured in real dollars, not opaque credits. That covers reader-assistant answers, build-time AI features and authoring runs from the CLI, and the Insights passes that grade and cluster your stored conversations. It pools across your whole account and drains before your prepaid balance. A free-model answer is always $0 — but those Insights passes run on their own model, not the answering one, so a conversation a free model answered can still draw the allowance; turn store_history off if you’d rather nothing were stored to analyse. Usage-based GitHub Automations compute bills your prepaid balance directly rather than the allowance.