Your balance
You have a balance, not a meter running
Every paid plan adds a set amount of importing to your account for each month you pay: so many documents, and so many pages of scanned reading. That amount is a balance. It rolls over, month after month, for as long as you subscribe. A slow month is not lost.
Annual plans receive the whole year's amount on day one, so a full archive can come in at once.
What counts
Filing a document draws one document from your balance. Reading a scanned page draws one page. A text file that needs no reading draws no pages. A duplicate of something already in your archive draws nothing at all, because it is never filed twice.
Nothing in progress is ever stopped
Your balance is checked once, when new work starts. Everything already importing runs to completion, always. Because pages are drawn as they are read, a large import can carry your balance below zero on its way to finishing. That is by design: the work you started is finished, and new imports wait until your next renewal tops the balance back up.
Each day opens a portion
On monthly plans, a quarter of your monthly amount is available on any given day. Your balance is unaffected; the rest of it opens the following day. Annual plans are not paced this way, since the year was paid up front.
Free accounts
A free account files up to 2,500 documents for the life of the account, and reads up to 200 scanned pages a day. When a day's reading is done, more opens the next day, and anything already importing finishes. There is nothing to buy back or make up; the pace simply resets.
Why it works this way
Reading a scanned page costs real compute. Measuring by balance means you always know where you stand, nothing you paid for expires at month's end, and no import is ever cut off in the middle. If your archive is bigger than your plan, an annual plan on day one is the direct route.