Introduction
Welcome to the Introduction to operations and credits course!
The goal for this course is to further delve into operations, credits, bundles and scenario scheduling within Make.
For this unit you’ll explore how operations, credits and credit counting work in Make.
What are operations?
Operations represent how many actions a module performs in a scenario.
As you build your scenarios, you can see how many operations the module performs.
Every time a module performs an action, you will see the number of times it performs that action. This is an operation.
When a row is added to your Google Sheets, this performs one operation. When you retrieve the weather, this also performs one operation.
If you add 3 rows to a Google Sheet, this performs 3 operations.
Other actions that perform operations are: Create / update / delete / transform / iterate / aggregate / read / search
Note: It’s important to note that error handler modules / filters / routers do NOT perform operations (rollback, break, resume, commit, ignore). These will be covered in a later course within Make Academy.
What are credits
Now that you covered how operations help you track actions in your scenarios, you will explore how credits work as the billing unit in Make.
What are credits?
In Make, credits and operations are connected, but different. Operations count the activities performed in your scenarios, while credits are what you pay for those activities and how you are billed within Make. You need to understand both to make the most of your credit usage.
Most modules will consume 1 credit per operation. For example, if you add a row in Google Sheets, or get the weather, these will be billed as: 1 operation = 1 credit.
Specific modules using AI features will consume multiple credits. You will learn more about this later. For example, an operation that uses an AI feature could consume 0.5, 2, or 6 credits upwards, depending on the complexity of the action.
Pro tip: Sometimes your operations can be even lower than one credit! Meaning, they can go as low as decimal fractions: 1 operation = 0.5 credits
What is credit counting?
Credit counting is ensuring that you are aware of how many credits you have consumed within a month.
The first module in a scenario runs only once and always counts as 1 operation and 1 credit.
Each time a module performs an operation, it consumes a credit based on the amount of operations required. For example, if there are 3 rows to add to a Google Sheet, this will consume 3 credits.
If you plan on using AI modules within Make, this will perform differently and is important to understand how many credits you will use, ensuring that you don’t run out of them. You will explore more on this in the next unit of the course.
Why is this important?
Knowing how many credits you have used is important because Make is priced on credits usage.
If you exceed your monthly usage of credits, your scenarios will be paused. If you are on an Enterprise plan, scenarios will continue to run for a limit.
You can purchase extra credits if you need to if you are on a paid plan. But the purpose of this unit is to meet your expectations of what can happen if you are not keeping track of your credits consumed.
Where do I see how many credits I consumed?
Every time you run a scenario in Make, each module will display a number next to it. By default this shows the amount of operations that have been performed.
You can see credits here too by turning on the Show credit usage option (which will be off by default).
To enable it, click the Canvas options icon next to your scenario name and toggle Show credit usage so it is on, as shown here.
When a scenario has executed, clicking the number next to a module opens up the bundle summary. This always displays both operations and credits for that module.
There, you will see how many operations were performed in the module and how many credits the operation consumed.
If you want to keep track of your overall operation usage, you can use the Organization dashboard. Let’s discover more on this.
Where can I track my operations used
You can easily track your credits used at any point by clicking Organization.
In order to locate your operations used you can access these from two places on the menu: Organization and Team.
For this exercise you will focus on the Organization tab, as it will display an entire account overview.
Note: that if you’re on any plans lower than the Teams plan (Free, Core, and Pro plans), you can always have only one team in your organization. We will cover Teams in a separate unit later.
This section will list your average daily credit usage, your remaining credits, and when your usage resets. For example, a free account is limited to 1,000 credits per month.
If you are using a free account, your active scenarios are listed here. Note that on a free account you can only run a maximum of two active scenarios at a time.
Your credits usage and data transfer are visually displayed here.
Note: that with a free account on Make, the maximum amount of data that you can transfer is 512MB, with a 5MB limit on filesize.
See pricing to compare different options.
The visual graph provides an overview of your credits and data transfer over the last month. This is especially useful as you can identify at what points you are consuming the most credits/data. If you hover over the timeline, it will specifically tell you your credit/data consumption each day. Give it a try!
Wrap up
In Make, credits and operations are related concepts, but different from each other. Operations count the actions performed in your scenarios, while credits are what you pay for those activities.
Credit counting tracks your monthly credit usage, with each operation consuming a specific number of credits. You can keep track of your credit and operation usage in each module.
You can check the credits you use in each module by checking the output bubble. If you want to track your overall operation usage, the Organization dashboard will provide you with an overview on the operations over the last month.