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Helium requires an active subscription for any access at all — the REST API, the MCP server, and the Slack app alike. Credits are still 1 credit = $0.01, but they’re split across two buckets: a monthly subscription grant, and a persistent balance shared with Horizon.

Subscription (required for all Helium access)

A Helium subscription costs $50/month and is required before any Helium endpoint will respond — REST, MCP, or Slack. There is no pay-as-you-go-only path: without an active subscription, requests are rejected regardless of any credit balance on the account. Subscriptions in either the active or past_due Stripe status count as active; a canceled, unpaid, incomplete, trialing, or paused subscription does not. Each successful renewal grants 6,000 credits/month into a dedicated monthly bucket. Unused monthly credits roll over, capped at 18,000 (3x the monthly grant) — any amount still at or over that cap when the next renewal lands is forfeited, not carried further.

How a charge is split across your two balances

Every billed Helium call spends your monthly bucket first. Only the shortfall, if your monthly bucket doesn’t cover the full price, is drawn from your persistent balance — the same non-expiring balance Horizon uses (free trial credits, prepaid packs, and Helium’s own add-on pack below). This is all-or-nothing: if the combined total across both buckets can’t cover a call’s price, nothing is charged from either one. A brand-new Helium-only signup starts with $0 in the persistent balance — unlike Horizon, it does not also receive a 1,000-credit free trial there. If you already have a Horizon account and subscribe to Helium from your dashboard, your existing persistent balance (free trial credits, packs, whatever you’ve already bought) is untouched and still usable as the fallback bucket described above.

Add-on credit packs (on top of the subscription)

If you exhaust your monthly grant before your next renewal, you can buy Helium’s add-on pack any time — it isn’t gated behind waiting for your next renewal: This lands in your persistent balance — the same shared, non-expiring pool Horizon’s own prepaid packs use — not the resetting monthly bucket. Buy it from the dashboard the same way you’d buy a Horizon pack; see Horizon’s Credits & Pricing page for the purchase flow.
GET /v1/usage currently reports your persistent balance only. If you have an active Helium subscription, your true remaining credits are higher than that figure by whatever’s left in your monthly bucket for this billing cycle — check your dashboard’s Helium billing card, which shows the monthly and persistent balances side by side.

Per-endpoint pricing

Charging on misses

Unlike Horizon’s person.email (charged only on a genuine find), all four of Helium’s billed endpoints — including find_lookalike_investors — charge their full listed price even when the result is a clean “nothing found” — the vendor call still happened and cost Gravity real money either way.

No caching

Unlike several of Horizon’s endpoints, none of Helium’s research results are currently cached — every search_investors, enrich_investor, research_company, or find_lookalike_investors call is a fresh live lookup, and every response’s cached field will read false. DELETE /v1/cache (Horizon’s cache-eviction endpoint) does not apply to any Helium endpoint today.

Monitoring features are free for now

Reply classification, Calendar meeting-prep briefs, and LinkedIn engagement monitoring don’t debit credits at all — they’re monitoring-tier, not billed endpoints, even though some of them internally reuse the same research logic as a billed call. The only billed piece of Helium’s monitoring/ discovery features is the on-demand find_lookalike_investors call above — its free weekly monitoring counterpart isn’t. See Monitoring & discovery for the full breakdown of what runs automatically vs. on request. This reflects today’s pricing, not a permanent commitment — any change to the subscription price, monthly grant, rollover cap, add-on pack, or per-endpoint costs above will be announced in advance; see the Terms of Service for the exact commitment.