Licencing Information

What is a Charisma Pro licence and why do I need one?

All stories created on the Charisma platform need to be associated with a Pro Licence. A Pro Licence connects into Charisma's credits system which will allow you to preview your story and publish it for others to play.

How do I activate a Pro licence?

To activate the licence, either head to your account page, scroll down to the "Licences" section, and click "Claim trial licence", or on the My Stories page click either the green "Pro" panel or the orange "Web Comic" panel and then click on "Start free trial". All these steps will bring up the terms and conditions, please review them and then click "Claim trial licence".

Is the Pro licence free?

Once activated, a Pro licence comes with a one month free trial period. This trial includes 50,000 free credits and unlimited stories. Once the month has expired or you have used up your free credits, you'll need to purchase a credits bundle to continue using the playthrough features.

What are credits?

Credits represent the ability to perform actions in Charisma.

What uses up credits, and how many credits do they use?

• Events
• Generation node
• Character improvisation
• Text-to-speech
• Speech-to-text

Events

Events are interactions occuring during a playthrough, including when a character says something or a player responds.

Each event uses up 10 credits. Below is a full list of events:

• start: when a graph is started
• reply: when a player sends a text message to Charisma
• action: when a player sends an action to Charisma
• message: when a character sends a message back to a player
• media: when a media node was used
• resume: when a playthrough has been resumed (the last character message is repeated)

Generation node

OpenAI: GPT-3 (text-davinci-003) is now deprecated, and Charisma will instead use the OpenAI: gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct model, which uses less credit.

Credits are deducted each time a generation node is run. This includes generation nodes that are considered during finding a pathway which are ultimately not selected to be part of the pathway. The quantity of credits depends on the model selected and the amount of text in both the prompt and the completion.

1 prompt or completion token is roughly equivalent to 4 characters of text.

Note that credits are still deducted if a completion was flagged as abusive and therefore not used by Charisma.

Prompt: Come up with a one line slogan for a bakery.
Completion: Baked with love, fresh every day.

Character improvisation

If character improvisation is enabled, credits are also used for each generation made.

The number of credits used is similarly based on prompt and completion tokens.

• Prompt: 0.220 credits per token
• Completion: 0.654 credits per token

The prompt is constructed from many sources, including the character biography, example dialogue, previous messages in the conversation, amongst others. The more information in each of these, the greater the number of tokens, and therefore the cost in credits.

It is suggested to experiment with different biographies, example dialogues, and recommended to keep these both concise to limit the cost in credits. However, the more information, generally the better the results of improvisation!

Forceus is the ruler of five planets, including Earth. He is forthcoming, assertive, and knows what he wants. He despises most people, but has a special admiration for the player.

Forceus took down the Galactic government by planting lies amongst the cabinet members. He's proud of this and wants to mention it at every opportunity.

PLAYER: What planet are you from?
CHARACTER: I am from the third moon of Saburn, a planet known for its desolate, grim atmosphere. Nothing lives there anymore.
PLAYER: So how are you here?
CHARACTER: I migrated when I was young. I didn't know my parents. I was an orphan.

PLAYER: Do you like space candy?
CHARACTER: The only food I feed on is contempt for questions like that.

Text-to-speech

When text-to-speech is generated for the first time, it incurs a cost based on the duration of the resulting audio clip.

If a line of text has already been generated (with the same parameters such as pitch and rate), no credits are used. Re-generating an already generated line will use credits.

Speech-to-text

When speech to text is used in a story the associated licence is charged based on the number of seconds submitted for transcription.

Localisation

When localisation is enabled, the associated licence is charged based on the number of characters submitted for translation.

Each character consumes 0.4 credits, inclusive of whitespace. Re-translating an already translated line will use credits.

Why do we charge for usage?

We've tried to keep costs as low as possible to make Charisma accessible to as many people as possible. That said, as all our infrastructure is hosted in the cloud, the more stories Charisma powers, and the more people who play those stories, the higher our hosting costs become.

Where can I see my credit usage and licence details?

In the story editor the credits usage information is shown at the bottom of the sidebar. This display will update automatically every minute or can be refreshed immediately by clicking the refresh icon.

On your account page there is a licence section which displays your licences, the credits used, and the credits remaining. If you click "View story breakdown" you will see the distribution of the credits spent in different stories and for different actions.

What happens when I run out of credits?

It will become impossible to start or continue playing a story attached to a licence that has run out of credits.

Where can I purchase more credits?

In your account page, in the licence section, under the billing tab you can purchase credits.

Where do I view invoices?

Your invoices can be accessed via the billing dashboard button at the bottom of the billing tab. You will also receive a receipt for your purchase via email.

What credit bundles does Charisma offer?

We currently offer 4 credit bundles to suit small to larger scale projects. All bundles are a one-off purchase and expire 12 months after the purchase date.

If you are looking for a larger number of credits or require a fixed cost for your project please contact us at hello@charisma.ai with more information about your project and we'll arrange a follow up chat.

The current usage bundle pricing is:

Please note that our pricing changes from time to time so please refer back to this page for the latest pricing.