Credits, seats, and plans

MicroChat uses two simple counters: credits for messages and seats for students.

Credits

Every message you (or your students) send to MicroChat uses credits. Writing a program, asking for a change, asking for an explanation — each one counts. Looking at your blocks or downloading to a micro:bit doesn't.

New accounts start with free trial credits that last for a set number of days. After that, credits come from your plan.

Your balance is on the Account page. When you run low, MicroChat lets you know in the chat instead of failing silently.

Seats

Seats are for classroom sessions. Each session reserves as many seats as the number of students you allow in it, for as long as it's running. Archive a session and its seats come back.

You can see Seats Available, Seats Reserved, and Total Seats at the top of the Code Sessions page.

Getting more

Click Upgrade Plan in the left-hand menu. Plans add credits each period and include more seats. If your school buys MicroChat for several teachers, your administrator manages this.

Student limits inside a session

When you create a session you set a message limit per student. That's separate from your credits — it stops one student from using up the whole class's share.