Every new AIVA account starts with ₹500 of free credit, no card required. We've written elsewhere about why we structured the offer that way. This post is about a narrower question we get asked constantly during onboarding: what does ₹500 actually buy? Not as a marketing line — as arithmetic.
The three channels, on their own
AIVA draws from one shared balance across three channels, each billed differently:
- Voice: ₹4 a minute
- Web chat: ₹2 a conversation
- SMS: ₹1 a message
Spent on a single channel, ₹500 works out to:
- 125 minutes of voice — roughly 40 real phone calls at an average length of three minutes
- 250 web chat conversations — a full conversation from first message to resolution, not per message sent
- 500 SMS exchanges — confirmations, reminders, reschedule replies
None of those is what actually happens in a live account, because almost no business runs on a single channel. The number is useful as a reference point, not a prediction.
What it looks like blended
Here's a more realistic first week for, say, a small clinic testing AIVA on its main phone line while also turning on the web chat widget and SMS appointment reminders:
- 40 minutes of voice, roughly a dozen calls, mostly appointment questions and "are you open Saturday" checks — ₹160
- 60 web chat conversations from the website — ₹120
- 220 SMS messages, mostly reminder-and-confirm pairs for booked appointments — ₹220
That's ₹500, spent, and by the end of it you've had roughly 300 real interactions with real callers and website visitors — not a demo, not a sandbox. That's usually enough for a business to see its actual call and chat patterns: which questions come up on repeat, where AIVA handles things cleanly, and where it needs a nudge in its setup.
Every AIVA account has an analytics dashboard that shows this exact breakdown for your own balance — minutes used, conversations handled, resolution rate — so you don't have to do this math by hand once you're live.
A busier business burns through it faster — and that's fine
Not every business gets a leisurely first week. Say a mid-size restaurant turns AIVA on right before a Friday-to-Sunday stretch and routes its whole reservation line through it. At 90 calls across the weekend, averaging two minutes each, that's 180 minutes of voice — ₹720 — before Monday morning. The ₹500 free credit alone doesn't cover that weekend; it covers most of it, and the business is into its first recharge by Sunday night.
That's not a failure of the free credit, it's the free credit doing exactly what it's supposed to: showing you, fast, what a real weekend actually costs, rather than making you wait three quiet weeks to find out. A business that burns through ₹500 in two days has learned something valuable and specific — its real weekend voice volume — that a slower-burning account wouldn't learn until much later. If this sounds like your business, it's worth reading about auto-recharge before you go live, so a busy Saturday night never runs the balance to zero mid-call.
A lighter business makes it last much longer
The opposite case is just as common. Say a solo tax consultant or a small professional-services office mostly uses AIVA for SMS appointment reminders and the occasional web chat question, with very few live phone calls — a channel mix that's SMS-heavy rather than voice-heavy. At, say, 15 SMS messages and four web chat conversations a day, that's ₹15 + ₹8 = ₹23 a day, or roughly ₹690 a month. The original ₹500 credit alone could realistically last two to three weeks for a business shaped like this, well past a first impression and into a genuine sense of the ongoing monthly cost.
Neither of these examples is "correct." They're the two ends of a real range, and most businesses land somewhere between them. The point of walking through both is that ₹500 isn't a fixed amount of time — it's a fixed amount of usage, and how long that usage lasts depends entirely on your own calling and messaging patterns, which is exactly the thing the free credit is designed to reveal.
Why "no card required" is part of the math
It's worth separating two things that usually get bundled together: the size of the credit, and the fact that you don't hand over a card to get it. A lot of "free trial" offers ask for payment details up front specifically so the business doesn't have to think hard about the transition to paid — the card's already on file, the recharge happens whether you were paying close attention or not. That's a reasonable business model, but it's a different one from what we're doing.
₹500 with no card on file means the only thing that gets you to a paid recharge is a deliberate decision on your part. Nothing auto-converts — there's no recurring auto-debit authorization sitting in the background waiting to trigger, because there's no card attached for one to run against in the first place. If the free credit answers your question and the answer is no, you walk away having spent nothing and given up nothing. If the answer is yes, you recharge because you chose to, with a real number in front of you instead of a trial-ending reminder email. That's a small structural choice, but it's the one that makes the ₹500 figure trustworthy in the first place — a generous number attached to a card you forgot you added isn't really a free trial.
Why the number matters more than it looks
A lot of free trials are structured to be too small to tell you anything, or too generous to tell you anything real about ongoing cost. Fourteen days of a feature-capped tier tells you whether the interface is nice. It doesn't tell you whether AIVA can actually run your phone line.
₹500 at these rates is sized to get you through enough real conversations that the answer stops being a guess. If your business runs at low volume, that credit might cover you for a couple of weeks of genuine use, the way it would for the tax consultant above. If you're a busier operation, closer to the restaurant example, you'll burn through it faster — which is itself useful information, because it tells you roughly what a full month is going to cost before you've committed to one.
Making the most of the week
Since the credit is finite and the information it produces is valuable, it's worth spending deliberately rather than passively. We've written a full walkthrough of what to actually test during a free trial — feeding AIVA your real FAQs, testing in the language your customers actually use, running a complete booking end to end instead of just a conversation — that's worth reading before you start the clock, so the ₹500 goes toward answering the questions that actually matter to your decision.
After the free credit is gone
Once the ₹500 is spent, there's no cliff — you're never asked to sign a plan or pick a tier. You recharge with a pack sized to your business: ₹500 to keep testing a little longer, ₹2,000 if you're ready to run AIVA on real volume for a month, ₹5,000 for a busier operation, or a custom amount above that. The pricing page lays out all four options, and the rate never changes based on which pack you buy — ₹4 a minute is ₹4 a minute whether it comes out of your first free rupee or your fiftieth recharge.
That's the whole idea behind the ₹500. Not a taste of the product. A big enough sample, across all three channels, that the number that comes after it — what a full month actually costs your specific business — stops being a guess and starts being something you can see for yourself.