How Does the Credit System Work? Do Monthly Credits Roll Over?

Bardeen’s credit system is simple: 1 credit is consumed for every action executed in an automation. 

Important Note: Test Your Playbook Without Using Credits!

When designing or refining your playbooks in Builder Mode, no credits are consumed. This allows you to freely test, tweak, and perfect your workflows without worrying about credit usage. Once you’ve built your playbook, you can run it with live data in Test Mode and see how many credits it will consume per execution.

This approach ensures that you can confidently estimate your credit usage before deploying your playbook for real-world applications. (Where Can I See How Many Credits I Have Used per Playbook?)

Once you run a playbook in a Test Mode, you'll get a nice breakdown of credits consumption, here's an example:

Do Monthly Credits Roll Over?

With a monthly plan, credits reset at the start of each new billing cycle. However, if you subscribe to a yearly plan, you receive all your annual credits upfront. This allows you the flexibility to use more credits during busy periods and fewer credits when needed.

And here is how credits consumption is generally calculated:

Basic Automation Example

• Goal: Fetch and export a single data point to Google Sheets (scrape 1 link).
• Steps:
  1. Fetch/scrape data from 1 link (1 credit).
  2. Export to Google Sheets (1 credit).
• Total Credits per Run: 2 credits.

Deep Scraping Automation

• Goal: Scrape a list of 10 links, fetch details from each, and export the data to Google Sheets.
• Steps:
  1. Scrape the list of links (10 credits).
  2. Fetch details from each link (10 credits, 1 per link).
  3. Export the data as rows in a Google Sheet (10 credits).
• Total Credits per Run: 30 credits.

Row-by-Row Processing

• Goal: Process 10 rows from a Google Sheet, scrape a link for each row, and add data to a Google Sheet individually.
• Steps:
  1. Get table from Google Sheet (10 credits).
  2. Scrape data for each row (10 credits, 1 per row).
  3. Export/update each row separately (10 credits, 1 per row).
• Total Credits per Run: 30 credits.

Optimize Your Credits Usage

1. Use Test Mode in builder to test an automation before running it live.

2. Review your automation steps to minimize unnecessary actions.

3. Choose a yearly plan for a flexible credits usage.