What spent my AI credits when I never ran a campaign - or wasn't even logged in?

KM Hub says AI is paused and your first thought is the one we hear most often: It's only been 3 days into the new month and now it says it's paused cause I reached my limit, and I have never used it at all this month. Or a charge lands and you think why was I charged when I haven't logged in and it still charged me. Or you look at the total and ask outright: What did I spend $50 on? and what was running in the background? One customer said it plainly: Because I never ran any campaigns and now I have a useless app on my computer. This article answers that question - not where the buttons live, but what actually spent the money while you were not there.

The honest answer: I wasn't even using it is usually true

KM Hub does not secretly start paid campaigns. It never buys leads you did not ask for, and it does not send an email you have not approved unless you granted autopilot. So when you say I never ran anything, we believe you, and in the real cases behind this article the customer was right.

Here is the part that closes the gap. Once you have set something up, KM Hub keeps doing that work on a schedule - including overnight, and including while you are logged out. That is the whole explanation for a month you remember as quiet that still shows spend. Nothing is broken and nothing is hidden, but you have to know which machinery is running before the numbers make sense.

What actually used my credits?

1. AI writing for an enrolled cold outreach campaign

This is the single biggest silent spender we see in real accounts. Once prospects are enrolled in a cold outreach campaign, the AI writes their messages in scheduled batch runs, not at the moment you click something. You enrolled the list once; the writing happens later, on its own clock.

From a real support case: 163 drafts written for $24.78, and the three biggest chunks all ran overnight - bursts of 35 to 38 drafts in about ten minutes, around 00:30 UTC, on three separate nights. On the Usage tab that spend lands in the AI writing row. You can see the drafts themselves on the campaign's Emails tab, with the date on each one, which is usually the moment the penny drops.

2. Lead finding from scheduled scout runs

If auto-scout is on, KM Hub checks your open pipeline every 30 minutes and fires one bounded scout whenever the count falls below your target. Nobody has to be logged in for that to happen. Each run bills the lead-source work behind it: people search, email lookup, web search, and email verification. In the same account that came to $18.26 across scheduled runs feeding the same campaign with fresh leads.

On the Usage tab this shows up as Lead finding rows with the provider in brackets, and alongside them rows such as People search (Apollo), Contact lookup (Hunter) and Web search (pooled). Auto-scout is off until somebody turns it on, so if you are certain you never enabled it, look at the drafting instead.

3. The hands-on features, which are usually cents

Everything you do by hand also draws on the same allowance, and each one has its own row: chatting with your AI team (COO, Sales Director, CMO, Strategy Coach), Copy Studio and Image Studio, Quick Event from Email, AI Fill on a client record, call transcription, image generation, and lead reading. In a normal month these are pennies, not the thing that emptied your allowance.

In the worked example above, those three groups came to roughly $45 in the weeks after signup, and almost none of it came from hands-on clicking.

See exactly what your money paid for

1. Click Settings (the gear at the bottom of the left rail).
2. In the Settings sidebar, open Billing & Money > Usage.

Four things on that page tell you the whole story:

• The Included allowance this month bar at the top. Red means AI is currently blocked.
• The This month, by feature table, with a Feature, Uses and This month column. Every feature that cost you money has its own row, its own use count and its own dollar figure. Nothing is bundled into a mystery total.
• The Your usage this month stats: AI you used (drawn from the allowance included with your plan), Fuel you used (pay-as-you-go work billed from your wallet), and Wallet balance.
• The Monthly AI spend limit box, which shows charges beyond your allowance so far this month against whatever ceiling you set.

If one row is far bigger than anything you remember doing by hand, that row is your answer, and the cause is almost always an enrolled campaign or auto-scout rather than a mistake.

Repeated $20 charges are not extra fees

If your card shows the same small charge more than once, that is not a second bill for the same work. Pay-as-you-go work is funded from a prepaid wallet, and auto top-up refills it on a rule you can see and change on the Usage tab. Out of the box that rule is: when the balance drops below $5, add $20. Those entries are refills of your own balance, not charges stacked on top of your usage. The full explanation is in the article on the wallet and auto top-up in this folder.

How do I stop it spending when I am not at the computer?

Pause the campaign - and do not reach for Delete

Open the Cold Campaigns page, click the campaign, and use the Pause button in its header (it reads Start on a campaign that has never run, and Resume once paused). To do several at once, tick their checkboxes in the list and use the bulk Pause button.

Be precise about what pausing does, because this is where people get caught out. Pausing holds the campaign's queued emails, so nothing else goes out until you resume it. It does not stop the AI writing drafts for prospects who are still enrolled, so pausing on its own does not end the overnight drafting spend. Pause is the right button when sending is what worries you. When the drafting cost is what worries you, take the prospects out.

To do that, open the campaign's Prospects tab, tick the rows, choose Delete from campaign from the bulk actions list, and click Apply. That removes the enrollment and cancels its queued follow-ups, so nothing further is written for those people. Unsubscribe (do-not-contact) is the gentler option when you want the record kept: it stops the sequence and adds them to your do-not-contact list, so there is no more drafting and no more sending.

Almost everyone tries Delete campaign first, and it is a dead end. Deleting removes the dashboard grouping while the enrolled prospects keep flowing, which is exactly why the app warns you to consider Archive instead. Skip that button.

Turn off the scheduled lead sourcing

1. Go to Marketing > Find Leads and find the auto-scout panel. Only an owner or admin can change it.
2. Flip the auto-scout switch off. That ends the every-30-minutes check entirely.
3. Prefer to keep it running on a leash? Lower Monthly budget ($) instead, then click Save ICP below it. It is a circuit-breaker: auto-scout pauses itself for the rest of the month the moment lead-finding spend reaches that number. The panel confirms the saved figure applies on the next scout, so there is no need to toggle anything off and on.
4. On the scout form itself, uncheck Keep this ongoing (auto top-up my pipeline) if it is set. That checkbox arms the same behaviour from the search screen.

If you would rather keep scouting without paying KM Hub for it, connect your own provider keys under Settings > Integrations. Lookups made on a key you brought are not billed by KM Hub at all - you pay that provider directly instead.

Put a hard ceiling on the month

1. Open Settings > Billing & Money > Usage.
2. Type a dollar amount in Monthly AI spend limit.
3. Click Save limit.

This is self-serve. You do not need to ask support to set a monthly spend cap for you. AI pauses the moment billable spend for the month reaches your number, blank means no limit, and the cap only counts charges beyond your included allowance. Raising it is also the fastest way to resume work that stopped mid-month.

Make an automatic card charge impossible

Turn Auto top-up off on the same Usage tab. With it off, no card charge ever happens on its own, and pay-as-you-go work stops when the wallet empties. The trade-off is real and worth saying out loud: with auto top-up off and a wallet balance of zero, AI pauses. That is the mechanism doing its job, not a fault.

Hiding a feature does not switch it off

Feature Visibility (at hub.kivimedia.co/?page=feature-visibility) tidies your sidebar. It is a decluttering tool for navigation. It does not stop a scheduled job that is already running, so use the campaign and auto-scout switches above for that.

Turning AI back on right now

Three situations, three fixes, all on the Usage tab: if your included credit ran out, turn Allow extra usage on; if you hit your own cap, raise or clear the Monthly AI spend limit; if the wallet ran dry, top it up or turn auto top-up back on. The article on AI is paused in this folder walks through each one, and your included credit resets on its own at the start of the next month if you would rather spend nothing more.

If the numbers still do not add up

Reading the feature table should make a surprising month explainable. If it does not, do not let that be the end of it. Submit a ticket from this help center and a person will go through your account's actual usage records line by line and send you an itemised breakdown of what ran, when, and what each run cost. Being pointed back at the Usage tab a second time is not an answer, and we would rather look than guess.