✨ Kai Pricing and Limits

Kai becomes generally available on 15 September 2026

Kai was free during beta, with a limit of 150 messages. From 15 September 2026 it consumes PPU credits from your project power, and the message counter is replaced by the limits described below.

Nothing changes in your contract, and no new line appears on your invoice. If you have questions about what this means for your project’s consumption, contact your Customer Success Manager.

Kai consumes PPU credits (project power units), the same credits that run your transformations, extractors, and data apps. Your contract rate applies to Kai exactly as it applies to a transformation hour.

Organization Admins can set up limits for your team to cap how much Kai can spend.

How Kai is billed

Kai is billed for the work it does. Every time Kai finishes a reply, the PPU charge is derived from what that reply actually cost to produce — the language model tokens it consumed and the infrastructure it ran on.

A short question costs less than a full data app build, in the same way that a five-minute query costs less than an hour of warehouse time.

You are not charged for opening the chat panel, for typing, or for a reply Kai cannot finish.

What one PPU buys

Typical costs for common pieces of work. Each figure covers the whole conversation — every reply it took to get to the result — measured across Kai usage in mid-2026:

Piece of work	Typical cost (PPU)	Per 1 PPU
Build or modify a data app	4.3	0.2
Diagnose a failed job or pipeline	1.4	0.7
Answer an analytical question about your data	1.2	0.8
Debug and fix a broken transformation	1.2	0.9
Set up or check a data source	1.0	1
Trace data lineage	0.9	1
Get help understanding the platform	0.8	1
Write and run a SQL query	0.4	3
Explore project and storage structure	0.4	3
Create a SQL transformation	0.3	3

The median conversation across all Kai traffic costs about 1.1 PPU, and simple work — writing a query, exploring a project, creating a transformation — runs three to four conversations per PPU.

These are medians, not a price list. A longer or more involved run of the same piece of work costs more, so treat the figures as indicative and expect your own numbers to vary.

Tracking Kai project spend

Kai Project Consumption

Kai spend appears in the Project Consumption dashboard as its own usage category, next to your extractors, transformations, and data apps. That is where you see what Kai actually costs, and how it trends over time. The dashboard is available to everyone with access to the project.

User Usage in Chat

At 80% of their limit, an indicator appears in the user’s chat panel. A user sees their own usage as a percentage of their own limit. They do not see PPU figures, and they do not see other users’ usage.

When a limit is reached, Kai stops and reports which limit applied, the user’s own or the project budget.

Setting limits

Kai spend limits live in Settings → Kai Agent → Kai spend limits in the main Keboola navigation.

Organization Admins set up limits for all users in the project, and can raise either limit at any time. Other users can open this page and see which limits apply, but the fields are read-only for them.

Hierarchy of limits

The project budget is the outer boundary. Every user’s limit sits inside it.

• Project budget — the most the whole project can spend in a month, shared across all users.
• Per-user limit — the most any one user can spend, and it can never exceed the project budget.

Kai stops for a user who hits their per-user limit. Kai stops for everyone once the project budget runs out, even for users below their own limit. Kai tells you which limit you reached.

Limits do not have to add up

Ten users with a 10 PPU limit each under a 40 PPU project budget is a valid setup: the budget is what the project can spend in total, not a sum of the individual limits.

Keboola only rejects a limit that can never be reached, such as a 20 PPU per-user limit under a 10 PPU project budget.

Setting the project budget

To set the project budget:

1. Go to Settings → Kai Agent in the main Keboola navigation.
2. Open Kai spend limits.
3. Enter a value in Monthly project budget.

Usage counts from the start of each calendar month, and the budget resets with it.

Setting per-user limits

The default per-user limit applies to everyone who does not have their own, and you change it by entering a new value in that field.

In the user table, adjust individual limits for heavy users rather than lifting the default for everyone, or set a limit to 0 to remove that user’s access to Kai. Use the reset button next to a limit to put that user back on the default.