Understanding Toolflow Credits
What are credits?
Credits are Toolflow's standard unit of measurement for platform usage. They function as the currency that powers your AI workforce. Every action your agents take, every conversation you have, and every piece of knowledge you upload consumes credits based on the resources required to complete that action.
Think of credits as the fuel that powers your digital employees. Just as real employees have associated costs, your AI workforce consumes credits as they work on your behalf.
How do credits work?
Credits are primarily consumed in three key areas:
1. Running Tools
When your agents use tools to take action in your apps or access external data, credits are consumed. This includes:
LLM Processing: Credits cover the language model calls needed for the agent to understand your request and generate appropriate outputs.
API Connections: When agents connect to third-party services like your email, CRM, or other business tools, credits are used to establish and maintain these connections.
2. Agent Conversations
Every message exchanged with your agents consumes credits:
User Messages: When you send a message to an agent, credits are used to process your request.
Agent Responses: Credits are consumed when the agent generates and sends responses back to you.
Context Maintenance: Toolflow maintains conversation context to ensure your agents remember previous instructions and information, which requires additional credit usage.
The length and complexity of messages directly impact credit consumption. More detailed instructions or complex requests will use more credits than simple queries.
3. Knowledge Base Management
Adding information to your knowledge base consumes credits:
Document Processing: When you upload files to your knowledge base, credits are used to process and index the content.
Embedding Generation: The system creates specialized embeddings of your knowledge for efficient retrieval, which requires credit usage.
Knowledge Retrieval: When agents access information from your knowledge base to answer questions, additional credits are consumed.
Larger knowledge bases with more documents will require more credits to maintain and utilize effectively.
Real-world usage examples
Here are some examples of how credits might be consumed in typical Toolflow workflows:
How to get more credits
The Pro plan includes 1,500 credits, which is designed to support typical business usage for most users. If you find you need more credits, you have several options:
Upgrade your plan
To change your current plan or discuss custom options with higher credit allocations, you can:
Email Alfie directly at [email protected]
Contact our support team at [email protected]
Optimize your credit usage
Make the most of your existing credits by:
Creating focused, specific instructions for your agents
Building efficient tool workflows that minimize unnecessary steps or use cheaper models (e.g. GPT4o-mini vs GPT4o)
Organizing your knowledge base effectively to reduce retrieval costs
Using pre-built agents from the marketplace, which are often optimized for efficiency
Credit best practices
To maximize the value you get from your credits:
Monitor usage patterns
Pay attention to which agents and tools consume the most credits and look for opportunities to optimize their efficiency.
Start with focused use cases
Begin with specific, well-defined tasks for your agents before expanding to more complex workflows.
Test on small scale first
When creating new agents or tools, test with limited data before applying them to larger datasets.
Add filters on automations
When consuming credits via Zapier automations you can risk using a lot of credits. For example, running an email inbox agent on every email received could burn unnecessary credits. Here we recommend adding filters in Zapier to ensure you only run the agent on relevant emails to save costs.
Keep knowledge relevant
Only upload documents to your knowledge base that your agents will actually need to reference.
Need help?
If you have questions about your credit usage or need assistance optimizing your workflows, our team is here to help. Contact us at [email protected] for personalized assistance.