# How Agent Credits Work

Source: https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-us/agents-credits

Credits are the meter behind Kapsule Agents and Kora: reading your account is always free, and you only spend when an expert produces finished work or makes a change you confirmed.

## What a Credit Is

One credit is roughly one short text exchange. Credits are always whole numbers, never fractions, and the ledger behind them is append-only: every grant, every spend and every expiry is a row you can see on the Credits page.

> **Note:** The Credits page is at **Agents**, then the credit arc in the page header, or go straight to `/agents/credits`. The same arc appears on the Agents home page and the Skills page, so your balance is never more than one glance away.

## Reads Are Free

This is the single most useful thing to know. When an expert checks your plan, reads your invoice list, looks at your sites, fetches your sitemap, or when Kora looks something up on your account, that costs **zero credits**. So does the planning and clarifying an expert does before it answers.

You spend on output and on changes, not on looking.

![The Agents credits page in KPanel](https://support.kapsulehost.com/help/screenshots/agents-credits.c0c41211.webp)

## What Different Jobs Cost

These are the default weights. They are adjustable centrally, so treat them as the current shape of the pricing rather than a contractual table, and always trust the estimate the panel shows you before you commit.

| Job | Credits |
|---|---|
| Planning, routing and clarifying | 0 |
| Short chat reply | 1 |
| Typical content reply | 2 |
| Long generation, around 1500 words | 3 |
| Skill run | 4, capped at 5 per run |
| Kora account read | 0 |
| Kora account change | 2 |
| External app call through a connection | 1 |
| Standard image | 9 |
| Image upscale | 15 |
| Premium or HD image | 25 |
| Logo or brand pack | 40 |

The composer in a conversation shows a live hint (**About 2 credits per reply**), a skill card shows its estimate before you start, and a confirmation card shows the cost of the change before you approve it.

## Your Trial Credits

Every account receives a one-off gift of **40 trial credits** the first time it touches any Agents surface. The grant is idempotent, so opening the page repeatedly does not create more, and it never double-grants.

Trial credits **expire 30 days** after they land. That is the only clock on them, and the Credits page shows the exact date.

> **Tip:** Trial credits are the cheapest way to find out whether Agents earns its keep for you. Spend them on the jobs you would otherwise pay a person for: a landing page rewrite, a returns policy draft, a set of product descriptions. A whole skill run costs about a tenth of the gift.

## Where Your Credits Live

The Credits page shows a **Where your credits live** card listing every bucket you actually hold, each with its own expiry:

| Bucket | Where it comes from | Expiry |
|---|---|---|
| Trial gift | The one-off signup grant | 30 days from the grant |
| Included with your plan | A monthly allowance carried by your plan | Rolls over one month, then expires |
| Credit pack | The monthly credit-pack add-on | Rolls while the pack is active, 90 days |
| Top up | A one-off purchase | 90 days |

Buckets with a zero balance are hidden rather than shown as empty rows, so the card only ever lists credits you really have.

## Which Credits Get Used First

You never choose. The engine allocates automatically, and the rule is designed so nothing expires while you still had a use for it:

1. **Whatever expires soonest is spent first.**
2. Where two grants expire at the same time, the order is Trial gift, then Plan credits, then Credit pack, then Top up.

That means your trial gift and your plan allowance are always consumed ahead of anything you paid for separately.

## Credits Are Reserved While a Job Runs

Before an expert starts a reply or a skill run, the estimated cost is placed on hold against your balance. This matters for two reasons:

- Two jobs running at once cannot both spend the last few credits.
- A job can never charge you more than it reserved. When it finishes, the hold settles at the actual cost, which is capped at the estimate. If the job never ran, the hold is released and you are charged nothing.

There is one more protection worth knowing: when a change is refused **before** it executed, for example because your role does not permit it, because it needed a checkout, or because a connection was not ready, that costs **zero credits**. You are never charged for an action that never happened.

## Running Low and Running Out

When your available balance drops to 20 credits or fewer, the hero note on the Credits page changes to a heads-up: *Running low. Your team will pause when you reach zero.*

At zero, conversations pause rather than degrade. The chat shows **You are out of credits** with a link to the Credits page, and the thread picks up exactly where it stopped once you have credits again. Nothing is lost and nothing is half-finished.

## Adding More

When a credit pack is available on your account, the Credits page shows a **Credit pack** card: 500 credits every month, billed monthly, cancel any time. The price shown is the price charged, resolved in your account's own billing currency, and a **plus GST** caption appears where GST applies to your account currency.

Once a pack is active, the pack card is replaced by a line telling you the pack's monthly credit count and its renewal date. Your trial and plan credits are always used before pack credits.

> **Warning:** Prices across KPanel are shown excluding GST. The GST-inclusive figure appears only at checkout, on the pay button. A card showing an ex-GST price with a **plus GST** caption is correct, not a discrepancy. See [Billing and Invoices](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-us/billing-and-invoices).

## Reading Your Recent Activity

The **Recent activity** card lists your latest ledger rows, newest first, each with a friendly label, a date, and a signed amount. Additions show a plus, spends and expiries show a minus. Labels map to what actually happened: *Quick chat*, *Chat reply*, *Long chat reply*, *Skill run*, *Account read*, *Account change*, *Connection call*, *Trial gift*, *Plan credits*, *Credit pack*, *Top up*.

If a row reads **Account read** with a zero amount, that is the free-reads rule showing its working.

## What If It Fails

**My balance dropped and I did not do anything expensive.** Check Recent activity. Long generations and skill runs are the usual answer, and image jobs are the most expensive rows in the table.

**Credits disappeared without being spent.** Look for an **expired** row. Trial credits expire 30 days after they land, plan credits roll one month, and pack and top-up credits last 90 days.

**A change failed and I still want to know if I paid.** Refusals that happened before the change ran cost nothing. A genuine failure during execution is charged at the account-change weight, because the work was attempted. The activity feed distinguishes them.

**The Credit pack card is not showing.** The pack is not currently offered on your account. Everything else on the page works as normal.

## Related

- [Kapsule Agents Overview](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-us/agents-overview)
- [Using Agent Skills](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-us/agents-skills)
- [How Kora Works](https://support.kapsulehost.com/en-us/how-kora-works)