What are credits?

On April 29th 2025, Voiceflow transitioned to a credit-based billing system. This system aims to simplify billing, make costs more predictable, and give you full visibility into your usage. This course is designed to help you optimize your AI agent to reduce the number of credits it consumes, saving you money while still keeping your agent powerful.

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What uses credits?

Most actions that your AI agent makes will consume credits. These include:

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💬 Messages

Each message sent by your agent consumes 1 credit.

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✨ LLM Usage

Voiceflow uses LLMs for a variety of features such as the Prompt step, Agent step, prompt-based logic, intent detection, and more.

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For most users, LLM usage will consume a nominal number of credits. You can check how many credits your agent is using for LLMs in the analytics dashboard. The number of credits an LLM consumes is based on the price of the model - expensive models such as GPT-4 Turbo will use more credits than lightweight models such as GPT-4o mini.

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☎️ Call Minutes

Each minute your agent spends on a call consumes 10 credits.

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🤖 Text-to-Speech Usage

Text-to-speech generations are charged in addition to call minutes and billed per character. The formula we use to calculate credit costs for text-to-speech is this: Credits = (Number of characters / 2000) × Multiplier. For example, if the Alice model has an 18x multiplier and we generate 100 characters of speech, the calculation would be (100 / 2000) * 18 = 0.9 Voiceflow credits.
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As a general estimate, ElevenLabs's Flash and Turbo models cost around 5 credits per minute and their Multilingual models cost around 10 credits per minute. Deepgram's voices cost approximately 2 credits per minute, and Rime's cost around 3 credits per minute.

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What doesn't use credits?

Some actions on Voiceflow don't consume credits. These include:

• Running functions, although messages sent by functions do consume credits
• Querying the Knowledge Base

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What happens if I run out of credits?

If your account runs out of credits, your agent will stop sending and replying to messages. To continue sending messages, upgrade your plan to one with additional credits.

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Calculate your current usage

To get started, we recommend calculating your current usage using our calculator. This will give you an estimate of how many credits we expect your agent to consume.

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Once you’ve calculated your current usage, you’re ready to dive into this course. We’ll show you how we recommend optimizing your agent to reduce its credit usage.