# Billing and credits

> How Runbear measures usage, what consumes credits, and what happens when they run out.

Source: https://docs.runbear.io/administration/billing-and-credits

Last updated: 2026-10-07

Runbear bills on two measures: **credits**, which agents consume as they work, and
**interactors**, the distinct people who talk to your agents in a month.

## Credits

Every message an agent handles consumes credits. How many depends on two things.

**What the agent did.** Answering from a knowledge base is cheap. Running a chain
of tool calls, reading long documents, or reasoning through a multi-step task costs
more.

**Which model it runs on.** The tiers differ by roughly a factor of three per step,
and the difference compounds across a busy channel.

| Workload                          | Typical range            |
| --------------------------------- | ------------------------ |
| Question answered from knowledge  | 10 to 20 credits         |
| Task involving several tool calls | 30 to 50 or more credits |

Actual usage varies with the size of the input and the number of steps.

### Spending less

Match the model to the job. For an agent that mostly answers from a knowledge base,
the cheapest tier of a model family costs about a third of the mid tier and usually
answers just as well; the expensive tiers earn their cost on analysis and
multi-step tool work. Change this in the agent's [settings](/agents/settings.md) **Model**
section, which Claude Agent SDK, Anthropic and OpenAI Responses agents have.

On OpenAI Responses agents, reasoning **Effort** is the other lever. Leave it low for
lookup-style agents.

### Watching usage

The [billing page](https://app.runbear.io/billing) (**Settings → Plan**) shows
overall consumption and usage by model. **Settings → Usage**, in organizations
where Runbear has rolled it out, breaks it down per agent and shows how many people
used each one.

### Running out

Agents pause when the organization reaches its credit limit. Runbear emails you
before that happens.

On the Free plan the included credits are the limit; upgrade to continue. On a
paid plan, an Admin can let agents keep going past the included credits: on the
billing page, set the **Overage limit** slider to the number of extra credits you
allow each month and click **Save**. The page shows the maximum overage cost for
that setting, and the credits used beyond the included amount appear as
**Additional credits**, billed per credit. **Remove limit** clears the overage
allowance, so agents stop again at the included credits.

> **Warning**
>
> Credits do not roll over. Unused credits expire at the end of each billing period.

## Interactors

An interactor is a person who talks to one of your agents. Runbear counts distinct
interactors per billing month: the same person asking fifty questions counts once,
and the count resets each cycle.

## Plans

Runbear's plans are Free, Starter, Individual, Team, Pro, Business and Enterprise.
New organizations start on Free, and the billing page offers Team, Business and
Enterprise, each billed **Monthly** or **Yearly**. Starter, Individual and Pro
remain for existing subscriptions. See [pricing](https://runbear.io/pricing) for
what each plan includes.

When Runbear is offering trials, an organization that has never had a paid
subscription can start a 14-day trial of the Team plan from the billing page.
Chat in Slack, Microsoft Teams and the web, agents and integrations all work
during the trial. The [public API](/api/overview.md) does not: you can't create
API keys, and API requests are refused until the trial ends and the paid
subscription starts. Changing plans during the trial doesn't end it early. Once
the paid subscription starts, existing keys work without being regenerated.

### Channels by plan

| Plan                      | Channels                                          |
| ------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------- |
| Free, Starter, Individual | Slack, Microsoft Teams                            |
| Team                      | Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord                   |
| Pro, Business, Enterprise | Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, HubSpot, Zendesk |

Some older Team subscriptions also include HubSpot and Zendesk. A channel your plan
doesn't include shows a lock on the agent's **Chatbots** tab and **Upgrade** on
**Settings → Integrations**; clicking either opens the plan picker. The agent's
runtime can narrow this further: agents on the Claude Agent SDK runtime deploy to
Slack and Microsoft Teams only. See [Runtimes](/agents/runtimes.md).

## Related

- [Agent settings](/agents/settings.md) — choose the model and, on OpenAI Responses agents, reasoning effort
- [Analytics](/administration/analytics.md) — what your agents are being used for
- [Chatbot settings](/channels/chatbot-settings.md) — deploy an agent to a channel
- [Pricing](https://runbear.io/pricing)