Your weekly free listening
Chippy gives you free listening every week, it counts the minutes you actually hear rather than the time you had it open, and it counts them per account.
Chippy gives you free listening every week. If a read just stopped, the panel has already told you which of three things happened, and they are not the same problem.
If Chippy stopped
If the app is not signed in to an account at all, it says to sign in.
If you joined but never opened the mail Chippy sent you, it says to verify your email and tells you where that mail is. An account that has not verified has no free minutes yet, which is not the same as having used them.
And if you have simply listened to your week, it says so and points at the plans.
In all three, nothing of yours is lost. Everything already in your History still plays, because it is a file on your Mac and playing it again asks for nothing.
Who gets it, and how much
The free minutes are for accounts that have verified an email or signed in with Google.
Your free listening is 60 minutes a week, and it starts again each week.
It counts what you heard, not how long it was open
The meter does not run while Chippy sits in the menu bar, and it does not run while you read with the panel open and silent. What counts is the minutes of speech you actually heard, plus the minutes of anything you said if you use Chippy to turn speech into text. Leave Chippy open all day and listen to nothing and you have spent nothing.
Playing something again from History is not spent either. A recording you already have is played from the file on your Mac, so a passage you listen to three times costs what it cost the first time. Speed does not change it: playing a recording faster is the same recording.
It is one allowance for you, not one for each Mac
If you sign in to Chippy on a laptop and a desktop, they do not each get their own listening. Every Mac signed in to the same account is counted together, as one person with one allowance.
A paid plan is not counted against the free allowance at all. If a paid plan ends, the account goes back to the free one, and the next time you reach the end of a free week Chippy says that is what happened rather than leaving you to work it out.