Most AIVA accounts run entirely on self-serve: start with ₹500 free, recharge in packs — ₹500, ₹2,000, ₹5,000, or a custom amount — whenever the balance runs low. It's designed to need no conversation with us at all. For a growing number of accounts, though, self-serve eventually stops being the right fit, not because anything's broken, but because the business has outgrown what a prepaid balance is built for. Here's how to tell.
The signals
You're recharging constantly. If you're topping up multiple times a week, even at the ₹5,000 tier, that's not a sign to buy bigger packs. It's a sign your actual usage has crossed into a range where a negotiated rate makes more sense than the standard per-unit pricing. Say a business is burning through a ₹5,000 pack — roughly 2,500 conversations' worth — in three or four days and recharging twice a week just to keep up. That's a business running something in the range of ₹35,000-₹40,000 a month in usage, which is well past the point where it's worth a conversation about the rate itself rather than just buying bigger packs faster.
You're running more than one location. Multiple branches on separate self-serve balances means separate top-ups, separate tracking, no consolidated view of what the business as a whole is spending. Say a five-location business has each branch recharging its own ₹2,000 pack independently — that's five separate balances to monitor, five separate low-balance notifications, and no single number that tells the owner or finance team what the whole operation spent on AIVA last month without manually adding five line items together. Centralised billing across locations is a custom-pricing conversation, not a recharge-pack one. If this sounds like a franchise or multi-branch setup, we've written more specifically about running AIVA across multiple locations.
Your finance team needs an invoice, not a top-up. A prepaid balance works well for a founder who can put a card down and move on. It doesn't work for a finance function that runs on purchase orders and monthly invoicing cycles rather than a card on file. That's a structural requirement, not a preference, and self-serve recharge isn't built to meet it.
You want a rate, not a rack rate. The standard rates — ₹4 a minute for voice, ₹2 a conversation for chat, ₹1 a message for SMS — are built to be fair at any volume from one conversation to thousands. At high enough volume, though, there's real room to negotiate, the same way any high-volume buyer negotiates a rate a low-volume buyer can't.
₹500 is the minimum for a custom recharge amount, but "custom pricing" as a conversation with sales is a separate thing from a custom recharge amount. One just lets you top up an odd number. The other renegotiates the underlying rate and billing structure.
What "high volume" actually looks like in numbers
Since the signals above are mostly behavioral, it helps to also have a rough numeric sense of where self-serve starts to strain. The recharge packs are sized at ₹500, ₹2,000, and ₹5,000 — if your business is comfortably and predictably buying multiple ₹5,000 packs every month, month after month, you're very likely in the range where custom pricing is worth exploring, even if none of the other signals above apply yet. That's not a hard rule — a seasonal business might hit that volume for two months a year and be perfectly well served by self-serve the rest of the time, since there's no cost to being on self-serve during the quiet months. It's specifically sustained, month-over-month high volume that tends to make a negotiated rate worth the conversation.
What actually changes
Moving to custom pricing doesn't change what AIVA does, it changes how you pay for it. Instead of a balance you top up, you get a quoted rate based on your real volume and a standard invoicing cycle your finance team can actually process. For multi-location businesses, that usually means one consolidated view instead of several separate ones.
What doesn't change
The per-unit logic stays the same. You're still paying for what actually happens — a minute of voice, a chat conversation, an SMS — not a flat fee disconnected from usage. Custom pricing adjusts the rate and the billing mechanics for your volume. It doesn't turn AIVA into a subscription product; the usage-based principle carries all the way up, regardless of what the negotiated rate ends up being.
You don't need every signal to qualify
It's worth being clear that these four signals aren't a checklist you need to fully clear before reaching out. Any single one is usually reason enough. A single-location business with steady, moderate volume but a finance team that simply can't process card-based top-ups is a custom-pricing conversation, even if its call volume alone wouldn't otherwise justify a negotiated rate. Equally, a fast-growing single-location business recharging constantly is worth the conversation even if it never expands to a second branch. The four signals describe different paths to the same conclusion — self-serve isn't the right shape for this account anymore — not four boxes that all need ticking.
What auto-recharge looks like once you're on custom pricing
One thing worth knowing if you're currently relying on auto-recharge to keep a self-serve balance topped up: moving to custom pricing and invoicing removes the need for it entirely, since there's no prepaid balance left to run dry. It also sidesteps RBI's rules around recurring auto-debit authorization on saved cards altogether, since there's no recurring card charge to authorize in the first place — just an invoice on a billing cycle. That's often a meaningful operational simplification on its own for a business that was managing auto-recharge thresholds across multiple locations — one invoicing cycle replaces several independently monitored balances.
When high volume and seasonality overlap
Some businesses hit the custom-pricing signals for a reason that's specific to their calendar rather than their steady-state size. A courier or logistics operator might run a moderate baseline volume most of the year, then see call and SMS volume spike hard around a major sale season — enough, for those few weeks, to blow past multiple ₹5,000 packs in days. An events or catering business might do the reverse: quiet most months, then genuinely enterprise-scale volume during wedding season across several coordinators fielding calls at once. In both cases, the right answer usually isn't switching to custom pricing permanently — it's recognising that the spike itself, not the average month, is what's creating the recharge friction. That's worth mentioning to sales directly, since a negotiated structure that accounts for a real seasonal peak looks different from one built around flat, consistent volume, and it's a different conversation from either the pure high-volume case or the pure seasonal case on their own.
How to start the conversation
If any of the signals above sound like where you are, the move is simple: talk to our sales team with your actual volume numbers — calls, chats, messages, over a recent month is enough. They'll work out whether a custom rate makes sense at your volume, and what an invoicing setup would look like for your business. There's no threshold you need to cross first. If self-serve is starting to feel like the wrong tool, that's usually reason enough to ask, and it costs nothing to have the conversation and find out — you can keep running on the standard pricing the whole time you're figuring it out, or start on the free credit if you haven't yet and grow into the question naturally.