In short
- Handoff turns are free.A turn that ends with the chat going to your team is not counted as an answer.
- Human chats cost nothing.While a teammate holds a conversation, the AI does not run for new messages.
- Only real answers count.You pay for answers the AI actually gave, not for it asking for help.
- Visible in your usage.Each conversation shows the credits it used, right in the inbox.
An AI agent should hand a chat to a person without hesitating when that is the right call. If every handoff cost you credits, there would be a quiet push to keep the AI talking. OneType removes that push: handing over is free.
What is not billed
- The turn in which the AI hands the conversation to your team, whether the visitor asked or the AI could not help.
- Every message the visitor sends while a teammate is handling the conversation.
- Your team's own replies to the visitor, from the inbox or Slack.
This follows a simple rule in how OneType bills: only a real answer from the AI is paid for. A turn that ends without one, because it was handed over, is released instead of charged.
Why the AI stays quiet during a takeover
When someone on your team takes over a conversation, the AI stops answering it. New visitor messages go straight to your teammate without a model ever reading them, so there is nothing to bill. The AI only starts again when your teammate hands the conversation back.
The summary is included
When a chat is handed over, the AI writes a short summary for your team: what the visitor wants, what was tried, their intent and their mood. That summary does not use your AI credits either. It runs as a small background task, counted only against your plan's hourly limit for background work.
Why this matters for your team
Because handing over costs nothing, you can set your agents up to reach for a person whenever they are unsure. When the AI cannot answer from your content twice in a row, it can pass the chat to your team instead of trying again and again. When handoff is on and a teammate is online in your opening hours, visitors who ask for a person are put through; otherwise they get a contact form. None of this eats into your AI credits.
It also means long human conversations are not a hidden cost. A support chat that goes back and forth for an hour with one of your teammates uses the same number of AI credits as it did at the moment of the handoff: no more.
The same holds when your team answers from Slack. A reply from the Slack thread reaches the visitor as a human message, and no model is involved in carrying it.
See it for yourself
Every conversation in the inbox shows how many credits it used, and your usage page lists what was billed and what was not, with the reason. You can check at any time that handoffs are not counted, and see exactly which conversations used credits and how many.
Human handoff is part of Premium, and it stays off until you turn it on for the agent. For what each plan includes, see pricing.