Clarification pricing: What are credits?

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I’ve just started using MindStudio. I like it a lot, but I am a bit worried about the lack of transparency regarding “Credits“. It is my understanding that a paid plan on Mindstudio gives one access to additional “Runs” per month and allows the creation of more agents. In addition, it seems there are some benefits in terms of support and resources.

It appears that “Credit” is used only to pay external AI providers. In other words, if my agents call an external service for which I have no API key, these providers are paid from my credits. This would imply that if I always use my own API keys, I would not need credits?

This would make sense. But now I have run into an issue that seems to conflict with this idea. I wanted to add a datasource to one of my agents (which uses only models for which I provide an API key). Nevertheless, I get the following error indicating I need credits.

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So, I wanted to see whether I could get some clarification about credits. Is my idea that credits are only used to pay for external services correct? And am I receiving this error because adding some documents requires some external embedding/vectorization? If so, I would like to know how I can assess/control the cost of this. For example, there does not seem to be a way to configure the embeddings or vectorization.

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Hi @Warne,

Thanks for the post!

You’re right, if you’re using your own API keys, model calls are billed directly by the providers, and your MindStudio usage balance isn’t touched.

The one exception is Data Sources. When you upload files, the text is extracted, split into chunks, and vectorized with an embedding model. That vectorization step runs through MindStudio’s usage balance, which is why you’re seeing the credits error.

The good news is, the cost is very low: $0.10 per million tokens (roughly 750,000 words).

You can track each specific cost in the Event Log:
https://app.mindstudio.ai/services/event-log

You can also learn more about how Data Sources work here:

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

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Thank you, this is just the information I was looking for.

I have one suggestion: it might help to make this information easier to find. I checked the documentation and website but couldn’t find a clear answer about pricing. I think it would help potential subscribers to see exactly how the costs work. For me, not knowing made me hesitate, but now that I understand, I’m ready to upgrade to a paid account.

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