# 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: 2026-08-26

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 on the agent's [settings](/agents/settings.md) tab.

Reasoning effort is the other lever. Leave it low for lookup-style agents.

### Watching usage

The [billing page](https://app.runbear.io/billing) shows overall consumption. Where
enabled, the **Usage** page breaks it down per agent and shows how many people used
each one.

### Running out

Agents pause when the organization runs out of credits.

| Plan | What to do                                                                                  |
| ---- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Free | Upgrade to continue                                                                         |
| Paid | Turn on pay-as-you-go to keep going past the included amount, with a spending limit you set |

Runbear emails you before the balance runs out.

> **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.

## Related

- [Agent settings](/agents/settings.md) — choose the model and reasoning effort
- [Analytics](/administration/analytics.md) — what your agents are being used for
- [Pricing](https://runbear.io/pricing)