AI assist and its limits
What draws on your monthly allowance, what never does, and what happens when it runs out.
The free plan includes a monthly allowance of AI assist. This page explains what spends it, what happens at the edges, and how to get through a heavy grading week without thinking about it much.
The short version: AI never runs unless you ask it to, and when the allowance is gone, grading still works.
Watching the allowance
InteGrade shows your usage as a percentage of the month, not as a count of anything. You will see it in the grading view and in your settings.
Three things happen as it fills:
- Around four fifths used, the meter turns amber and AI requests slow down. Everything still works; it just takes longer.
- At full, AI assist pauses for the rest of the calendar month and picks back up on the first.
- After a heavy burst in a single day, AI may cool down briefly and then resume. This is short: minutes, not days.
When AI is paused, InteGrade says so plainly rather than failing at you, and the generate buttons explain themselves.
What draws on the allowance
- Rebuilding a rubric from an existing rubric PDF. See Importing an existing rubric.
- Drafting feedback. See Feedback drafting.
- Analyzing methods across a class. See Course method analysis.
- Pulling text out of course materials you upload. See Uploading course materials.
- Reading pages with InteGrade's AI during upload: the option for splitting a scanned stack and reading names.
What never draws on it
- Grading itself: rubric items, comments, annotations, answer grouping.
- Exporting grades, and sharing graded work with students.
- Reading names in your browser when you split a scanned stack.
That last one is the lever worth knowing about. Bulk scans are the biggest AI consumer on a normal grading week, and reading names locally costs nothing from the allowance no matter how large the class is. If you are watching the meter, start there: Bulk scans and automatic matching.
If you run out mid-week
Nothing breaks. Manual grading, export, and sharing are unaffected, so a paused allowance slows you down rather than stopping you. If it keeps happening, the full version lifts the cap. See Upgrading to the full version.
Privacy
Everything on this page is about cost, not confidentiality. For what is sent where, and what is never sent at all, read How InteGrade uses AI and Student privacy and data handling.