Credits and pricing

connect0 bills usage against a prepaid credit wallet on your account. 1 credit = $0.01. Work that costs money — model calls, paid tool calls, sandbox compute, storage — is metered and burned from your credit balance. This page explains the model so nothing about your bill is a surprise.

What consumes credits

Every metered action emits a usage event attributed to your account. The largest driver is normally model usage (input and output tokens on the model an agent runs), followed by paid tool calls such as web_fetch and any provider-backed skills. Sandbox compute, connector materialise calls, file transfer, and stored data all meter too. Reading data you already have, listing connectors, and other control-plane operations are not metered. See Usage and metering for exactly how events turn into credit burn.

Where credits come from

You get credits three ways:

• Free starter grant — a one-time grant on a new verified account, so you can run real agent work before you ever add a card.
• Credit packs — one-time top-ups. Larger packs include bonus credits, and purchased credits are the longest-lived.
• Subscriptions — a monthly grant of credits at a discount, plus higher concurrency. A plan is a cheaper way to buy credits, not a feature paywall.

Buy packs or manage a subscription from Billing at /a/<slug>/billing — see Managing billing.

How the wallet works

Credits are granted to your account and burned as usage is rolled up each hour. Your current balance and per-grant expiry are visible in the wallet at /a/<slug>/billing/credits. Grants can be time-limited, so an unused plan grant eventually expires; pack credits last much longer. The balance shown always reflects what's currently spendable — a purchase made with a delayed payment method (ACH, SEPA) shows as pending with an estimated settlement date and cannot be spent until it settles.

Platform key vs BYOK

By default your model calls run on connect0's platform provider keys and burn credits at the catalog rate. If you bring your own key (BYOK), you pay the provider directly and connect0 charges only a small orchestration fee in credits instead of the full token cost.

Running out

When the wallet is empty, credit-burning actions fail closed rather than running up a debt. For example web_fetch returns an insufficient_credits result and an agent run that needs a paid model call stops instead of proceeding. Reads, dashboards, and data export keep working — running out of credits never holds your data hostage. Top up at /a/<slug>/billing/credits and the same action succeeds on the next attempt.

Keeping costs predictable

• Pick a cost-appropriate runtime model — see Choosing a model.
• Watch spend at /a/<slug>/usage; it aggregates every metered action by product and model so you can see where credits go.
• Set a spend cap and balance alert so nothing runs away — see Spend controls.

Where to go next

• Managing billing — buy credits, manage a subscription, and read invoices.
• Usage and metering — how a metered action becomes a credit burn.