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Make credits explained: what uses a credit, what doesn't, and what extra credits cost (checked November 2026)

Updated November 14, 2026 · Facts come only from the vendors' official pages listed under Sources. We have not run paid accounts on these products for this page.

Make sells its plans in credits. Most module runs use one credit, but not all of them: some modules are free, a polling trigger uses a credit even when it finds nothing new, and AI features and the Make Code app can use many credits in a single run. This page puts the counting rules from Make's pricing page and Help Center in one place, with worked examples of what a scenario uses in a month. To compare the same workflow on Make, n8n and Zapier, use our automation cost calculator.

The short answer

• Credits are what you pay for; operations are what your scenario does. An operation is one module run that processes or checks data. For apps without AI, 1 operation uses 1 credit.
• Each module counts on its own. A trigger uses 1 credit per run, a search 1 per run however many results it returns, an action 1 for each bundle (item) it processes.
• A polling trigger uses a credit on every check, even when it finds nothing. A scenario that checks every 15 minutes uses about 2,880 credits a month on checks alone, by our arithmetic. That is nearly three times the Free plan's 1,000.
• Some modules are free: routers, filters, error handlers, Make Functions and the Scenarios modules that call or start other scenarios.
• Some features use more: the Make Code app uses 2 credits per second of run time, and Make's AI Provider adds credits for the AI tokens used.
• Extra credits cost 25% more than the credits in your plan, whether you buy them by hand or have them bought automatically.

Credits and operations

Make switched its billing unit from operations to credits on August 27, 2025. Existing operations were converted 1:1, and Make said prices did not change. Both words are still used: per Make's Help Center, operations "count the activities performed in your scenarios, while credits are what you pay for those activities."

For most apps the two numbers are the same, because 1 operation uses 1 credit. They differ in a few cases: for AI features that also charge for tokens, for the Make Code app, for some Make AI Content Extractor modules that use 2 or 10 credits per operation, and for the modules that use no credits at all.

What uses a credit, module by module

A bundle is one item of data, such as one email, one row or one contact. Bundles are what multiply your credits: when a trigger or search returns 10 items, every action after it runs 10 times. Make's own example is a search that returns 10 rows (1 credit) followed by a delete step that runs once per row (10 credits): 11 credits for one run.

The opposite also works in your favour. Make's Operations page describes a scenario that emailed one message per new contact (11 operations for 10 contacts) and was changed to combine the contacts with a Text aggregator and send one email: 3 operations.

Triggers: polling versus instant

How a scenario starts matters more on Make than on Zapier, which does not count checks for new data as tasks.

• Polling (scheduled) triggers ask an app for new data on a schedule. Make's Help Center says trigger modules "use 1 credit per run, regardless of whether they return data. Even when a trigger finds no new data, it still uses 1 credit for checking."
• Instant triggers and webhooks run when the app or caller sends data, so there are no empty checks. Make's pricing FAQ still lists "read data from an app or webhook" among the steps that use credits, so the webhook or instant trigger module itself uses 1 credit per run.

What that means for a polling scenario, by our arithmetic (24 hours a day, a 30-day month):

A 31-day month adds one more day of checks (2,976 at 15 minutes). On the Free plan's 1,000 credits a month, a single scenario polling every 15 minutes runs out of credits in about 10 days before any of its actions have run. If the app you start from has an instant trigger, or can call a Make webhook, that avoids the empty checks altogether.

If you run out, scenarios stop until credits are added. Incoming webhooks wait in a queue (667 items per 10,000 monthly credits in your plan, up to 10,000), and polling scenarios pick up records from the last successful run when they resume.

AI features and Make Code: when one run uses more than one credit

AI modules

How an AI step is billed depends on how it connects to the AI model:

• Your own connection to an AI provider (an OpenAI, Anthropic Claude or Gemini app module with your API key, or a custom AI provider connection in Make AI Agents and Make AI Toolkit): 1 credit per operation, and you pay the provider for tokens. Custom connections in Make's own AI apps need a paid plan; since November 6, 2025 that includes Core.
• Make's AI Provider (all plans, in Make AI Agents and Make AI Toolkit): 1 credit per operation plus credits for the input and output tokens, at a rate that depends on the model you pick.
• Automatic connections (Make AI Web Search, Make AI Content Extractor, and the Simple Text Prompt module of the OpenAI, Gemini, Groq and Anthropic Claude apps): credits based on tokens, operations and, depending on the module, file size or pages.

Token rates for some of the models on Make's AI Provider (Make's Credits page lists more, and says the models and rates may change):

The Small, Medium and Large rates took effect on August 25, 2026, when Make started pricing input and output tokens separately for these three tiers. Make's own example: an extraction step with 2,000 input tokens and 100 output tokens dropped from about 0.6 credits to about 0.16 credits on Medium, a 73% reduction. Steps that write long output from a short prompt can cost more than before.

Worked example (our arithmetic). One Make AI Toolkit step with 2,000 input tokens and 100 output tokens, run 1,000 times a month on Make's AI Provider. Each run is 1 credit for the operation plus the token credits:

The same step costs more than ten times as much on the largest models as on Medium. With your own API key, the same 1,000 steps would be 1,000 credits, plus whatever the AI provider charges you for the tokens.

Make Code

The Make Code app runs JavaScript or Python inside a scenario and is available on paid plans. It uses 2 credits for every second of code run time. Make says the billed time does not include its back-end processing, so it is shorter than the time the run takes, and that most uses run in under a second. The sandbox allows up to 30 seconds per run on Core, Pro and Teams.

Maia, Make's AI assistant

Chatting with Maia to build or change scenarios also uses credits from the same pool as your scenarios; Make's examples show single responses using 140.04 and 160.18 credits. On paid plans, the first 70 messages within 30 days of your first chat are free, as a temporary promotion. Free plans get a 30-day trial with 45 messages. Make notes that this may change while Maia is in public beta.

How many credits each plan includes

• Free: 1,000 credits a month, 2 active scenarios, a 15-minute minimum interval between scheduled runs.
• Core, Pro and Teams: you pick a credit tier on a slider and the price follows it. The page text we read showed the 10,000-credits tier with annual billing: Core $9, Pro $16 and Teams $29 a month, which Make also writes as $0.90, $1.60 and $2.90 per 1,000 credits. Other tiers and monthly-billing prices only appear in the browser after moving the slider or the toggle, so we do not list them here.
• Tier ranges: since November 6, 2025, Core goes up to 300,000 credits a month and Pro up to 8 million, per Make's announcement of that change.
• Enterprise: custom pricing.

Your credit tier also sets other allowances. Per 10,000 monthly credits, the pricing page lists 5 GB of data transfer, 10 MB of data storage, 10 MB of incomplete-execution storage (up to 2 GB) and 667 items per webhook queue (up to 10,000).

When credits expire

• Monthly billing: credits are given per billing month and expire at the end of it.
• Annual billing on Pro and Teams: you pay for the year up front and get the whole year's credits at once, to use over 12 months.
• Annual billing on Core: credits still reset every month.

Extra credits follow the same rules: they last until the end of the current billing month, or the billing year on annual Pro and Teams, and on annual Core they expire at the monthly reset.

Changing plans moves credits rather than refunding them. Make has no cash refunds. When you upgrade, unused credits (extra credits included) become a dollar discount on the new plan, worked out at your current plan's price per credit. When you downgrade, unused credits move to the new plan for its first billing period. When you cancel, the paid plan runs to the end of its term and the organization moves to Free with 1,000 credits a month (if you have no other Free organization); unused credits do not carry over.

Extra credits: 25% more than plan credits

If you run out before the month (or year) is over, you can move to a bigger tier, buy extra credits, or turn on auto-purchasing.

• Manual purchase: in units of 1,000, on paid plans, by card.
• Auto-purchasing: when the credits in your plan run out, Make buys 10,000 more and bills you. It can repeat up to the number of credits in your plan in each cycle: on an 80,000-credit plan, at most 8 times. Running out of data transfer can also trigger a purchase while credits are left.
• Price: both ways cost 25% more than the credits in your plan, per Make's Extra credits page. Before November 6, 2025, automatic purchases cost 30% more and manual ones the plan rate. The pricing page's FAQ still describes extra credits as sold "at the fixed price defined in your subscription"; the Help Center pages give the 25% figure and a worked example.

Make's example: on a $9 plan with 10,000 credits, 1 credit costs $0.0009. 1,000 extra credits cost $1.125, and 10,000 extra credits cost $11.25. By the same arithmetic at the 10,000-credit tier, 10,000 extra credits cost $20.00 on Pro and $36.25 on Teams.

Make itself recommends a bigger tier if you buy extra credits regularly, because higher tiers have a lower price per credit. Make emails the people who manage the organization at 90% and 100% of credits used, and at 75% if usage is running ahead of the month.

Worked example: one scenario, three ways to start it

Take the scenario from our n8n vs Make vs Zapier comparison: one trigger and five action steps, with 1,000 new items a month, each handled in its own run. Our arithmetic, from the rules above:

1. Instant trigger or webhook: 1,000 runs × (1 trigger + 5 actions) = 6,000 credits a month. That fits the 10,000-credit tier: Core at $9 a month billed annually.
2. Polling trigger, every 15 minutes: 2,880 checks (each 1 credit, items or not) + 1,000 × 5 actions = 7,880 credits in a 30-day month. Still inside 10,000, with less room to spare.
3. Polling trigger, every minute: 43,200 checks + 5,000 = 48,200 credits a month, nearly five times the 10,000-credit tier. The price of that tier is not in the pricing page's text, so check it on the slider.

If a check sometimes finds several items, the actions still run once per item, but the trigger's 1 credit covers all of them.

Adding the Medium AI step from the AI example to each run adds about 1,150 credits a month; on Claude Sonnet 5 it adds about 6,540, enough on its own to take scenario 1 past 10,000.

Ways to use fewer credits

These follow from Make's counting rules above:

• Use an instant trigger or a webhook where the app has one, instead of polling. If you must poll, a longer interval cuts the empty checks.
• Filter early. Filters and routers use no credits, and a filter that stops a bundle stops every action after it from running.
• Aggregate before you send. One email or one row with 10 items is 1 action instead of 10.
• Watch the AI model. Larger models on Make's AI Provider use many more credits per step; on paid plans you can connect your own API key and pay 1 credit per operation instead, plus the provider's own token charges.
• Keep Make Code short. It is billed by the second.
• Check where credits go. Make shows credits per module in the Scenario Builder, per run in scenario history, and per run across all scenarios in Credit Usage.

Check the current numbers

• Make pricing
• How features use credits and Credits in Make's Help Center
• Extra credits in Make's Help Center
• Compare with n8n and Zapier: n8n vs Make vs Zapier pricing and the automation cost calculator

Sources

1. Make pricing page (plans, FAQ, usage allowance) — https://www.make.com/pricing, checked November 14, 2026
2. Make Help Center: Credits — https://help.make.com/credits, checked November 14, 2026
3. Make Help Center: How features use credits — https://help.make.com/how-features-use-credits, checked November 14, 2026
4. Make Help Center: Operations — https://help.make.com/operations, checked November 14, 2026
5. Make Help Center: Webhooks — https://help.make.com/webhooks, checked November 14, 2026
6. Make Help Center: Extra credits — https://help.make.com/extra-credits, checked November 14, 2026
7. Make Help Center: Adjustments to plans and pricing (November 6, 2025) — https://help.make.com/adjustments-to-plans-and-pricing, checked November 14, 2026
8. Make Help Center: Monthly and annual subscriptions — https://help.make.com/monthly-and-annual-subscriptions, checked November 14, 2026
9. Make Help Center: Change your subscription — https://help.make.com/change-your-subscription, checked November 14, 2026
10. Make Help Center: Cancel your subscription — https://help.make.com/cancel-your-subscription, checked November 14, 2026
11. Make Help Center: Credits as the new billing unit (August 27, 2025) — https://help.make.com/coming-soon-credits-as-new-billing-unit-in-make, checked November 14, 2026
12. Make Help Center: Updated AI Provider token pricing (August 25, 2026) — https://help.make.com/more-value-for-your-credits-updated-makes-ai-provider-token-pricing-model, checked November 14, 2026
13. Make Help Center: The Make Code app — https://help.make.com/the-make-code-app-is-available, checked November 14, 2026
14. Make Help Center: Maia by Make pricing — https://help.make.com/maia-by-make-pricing, checked November 14, 2026
15. Make Help Center: How to track credits — https://help.make.com/how-to-track-credits, checked November 14, 2026