What are credits and how many do I need?

Credits are used to estimate how much work Carly is doing. In general, the more complex an operation is, the more credits used. There is no exact formula because the agent has the ability to write its own custom code to make big operations very efficient, which can turn a 100-action request into a simple 1-action solution. Furthermore, certain actions do not cost any credits:

• The agent sending an email from its account. When Carly (or any other email agent) sends an email, that does not cost credits.
• Deterministic workflows. Workflows without LLM calls or web searches do not cost any credits. That means you can set up workflows that run continuously and get triggered by every email, account added, etc. and those are free. Many workflows do not need an LLM step at all. For example:
  • Every time I get an email from notifications@github.com, label it “Github” and add a row to the tracker
  • Every morning at 7 am, send me the front page stories from Hacker News
  • When I get an email from joe@gmail.com or susan@gmail.com sent to my work email, forward that email to my personal email
  • Scrape my competitors’ websites every day and save cleaned output in a Drive folder with the date and name
  • Every day at 5 pm, send an email to my work email with the calendar events for the next day, excluding all-day events
• Using Carly from Claude, ChatGPT, or another MCP client. Carly tool calls made through the MCP connector cost no credits.

These all cost no credits whatsoever.

Workflows with AI steps cost very little. When a workflow does need an LLM step — to summarize, classify, or draft something — you pay for the text it reads and writes. A typical step costs about 0.01 credits; a long one, like summarizing a full inbox, can cost 0.1 to 0.3. For example:

• Every morning at 7 am, summarize the emails I received overnight and send me a digest — about 3 credits per month
• When a customer emails, classify it as urgent or routine and label it accordingly — at 20 emails a day, about 6 credits per month
• Before each meeting, research the attendees and email me a briefing — at 4 meetings a day, about 3 credits per month
• Turn incoming emails into Asana tasks with an AI-written title and summary — at 10 emails a day, about 4 credits per month
• When an email arrives with an attachment, figure out which client it belongs to and file it into the right Drive folder — at 5 attachments a day, about 2 credits per month
• When an email about a deal or opportunity arrives, pull out the company, stage, and next step and add a row to a Google Sheet — at 10 a day, about 4 credits per month
• When a new lead comes in, research their company, draft a personalized follow-up, and log them to HubSpot — at 10 leads a day, about 8 credits per month

Guidance on credits

Users typically spend the most credits the first month of use, as setup is a credit-intensive process.

Recurring scheduled tasks are the biggest eater of credits. We recommend users employ recurring tasks no more than daily and should explore whether a Workflow (with an LLM call if needed) can serve the same purpose.

If you want to use Carly without worrying about credits, we recommend the 7,500 credit/mo add-on. If you want to figure out your actual credit needs, we recommend starting with the Personal Plan and seeing if you run out during the month. If you do, you can track your steady-state credit burn and figure out how many you will need per month.

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