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Welcome to the final unit of the “Introduction to operations and credits” course!
So far, you’ve explored how operations and credits work in Make, and examined the various scheduling options available for your scenarios.
In this unit, you’ll learn how to get the most out of scheduled scenarios and how to track the credits they consume, along with other elements that impact your credit usage.
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It’s important that you have a clear understanding of what you want your scenarios to do, and when.
The requirements of your scenario are really important:
- How often do you want to collect data?
- Is it crucial that the scenario runs at a set interval?
- Will you be running the scenario only once?
You may create a scenario that you want to run every 1, 5, 10 or 15 minutes, but in reality it does not need to be scheduled to be that frequently.
Note: The minimum interval a scenario can be scheduled for on a free plan is 15 minutes, while the minimal interval on a paid plan is 1 minute.
Let’s explore a few practical examples over the next few pages, and then show you how to review your credit consumption vs the output of your scenario.
HOTSPOT ELEMENT
A really useful tool within Make allows you to review the history, details and incomplete scenario executions.
To access your scenario summary page, view the menu and select Scenarios. Then select Make Foundation Use Case (the scenario you have already created). This will load the scenario summary screen.
Diagram
The Diagram tab describes your scenario and even shows a breakdown of your scenario credit and data usage. This is really useful when you start to execute multiple scenarios, and want to review the performance and overall usage.
Note that you can hover over the usage chart at the bottom of the screen to track credit / data usage by day.
History
The History tab will provide you with a summary of when a scenario was started, if it was successful / unsuccessful, the duration it took to run the scenario, the operations and credits it consumed, and the data transferred.
This will show the History of your scenario, and will highlight when the scenario:
- was last edited
- ran successfully
- failed to run successfully
- encountered an error
Please note that your history for a scenario will display for a maximum of 30 days.
Notice the Details icon here - this will be covered shortly.
Incomplete Executions
The Incomplete executions tab will display a list of scenario executions where a scenario was stopped. This is a useful tool as it would help diagnose what issues you are encountering, and the steps you should take to resolve them.
Note that this feature needs to be enabled in the advanced settings within the scenario in order to be listed here.
Incomplete executions will be covered in a later course in the Make Academy.
HOTSPOT ELEMENT
The Details tab provides a detailed breakdown of your scenario executions. Clicking the Details button from the History tab will open a new tab within history, stating the date and time of the executed scenario. A successful scenario will display with a green tick, an unsuccessful execution will show with a red warning.
Scenario Run Summary
Here is what a scenario run summary of your Make Foundation Use Case will look like. It shows the operations performed, credits consumed and the data used.
For example, a summary for “JULY 30, 2025 4:12 PM” might show:
- Run ID:
c4368948bbb8bb64fa0ab2ba6067587... - Duration:
1 second - Operations:
2 - Credits:
2 - Data size:
604.0 B
Another example for “AUGUST 5, 2025 4:05 PM” might show:
- Run ID:
f6b1aeb862fd4f38a6e85ec3fb1a3... - Duration:
Less than a second - Operations:
2 - Credits:
2 - Data size:
591.0 B
The Log
The Log details a story from what you have seen in the scenario execution. For instance, in the example from “JULY 30, 2025 4:12 PM”:
- The Weather module trigger retrieved the current weather, using one operation and one credit.
- A row was added via Google Sheets → Add a Row, using one operation and one credit.
Therefore, this scenario performed two operations and consumed two credits.
A bundle did not pass through the filter (indicated by the red circle with a slash next to Google Sheets - Add a Row), as it didn’t meet the filter criteria set up in course 2.
If you hover over each module and operation summary, you will see this reflected on the scenario view by pulsating if the operation was completed.
Note: You can toggle between Simple / Advanced log for further insights.
Incomplete Executions
The Incomplete Executions tab will display a list of errors where a scenario could not be executed due to an error. This is a useful tool as it would help diagnose what issues you are encountering, and the steps you should take to resolve them.
Note: This feature needs to be enabled in the advanced settings within the scenario in order to be listed here. Incomplete executions will be covered much later when using Make.
FLIP CARD
Now that you know how to identify the history and details of your scenarios, as well as how to count your credit use, review each card to the right. Note that all of these scenarios use fixed credits.
Before you click each card, ask yourself how often you would need to run / schedule the scenario, and how many credits you would likely consume.
Receive a weather notification in the morning
This is an easy one - here you would want to schedule the scenario once per day. If the requirements changed to add an extra notification in the afternoon, then schedule twice per day at specific times.
This would consume 2 or 4 credits a day, respectively.
Over a month this would consume around 60 or 120 credits, respectively.
Conclusion: It does not make sense to schedule this every hour.
Watch for social media posts that mention my username
This scenario depends on requirement and how soon you would like the information / how often you are likely to be mentioned.
This would consist of the source module searching for posts on a social media website (e.g. LinkedIn), a module to like the post, and a spreadsheet to add a record of the post.
For this scenario you could run it 4 times a day, with a limit of 20 returns.
Therefore this scenario would consume a minimum of 4 credits per day (if your name is not mentioned) and a maximum of 164 credits.
Conclusion: You can see very quickly how your credits can be used if you do not understand your requirement / scheduling need.
Notify staff of queries / issues from a help form
Let’s assume you work at a small business, using a form to collect queries, and want to alert the support team when a customer sends a query.
This would use a form and a messaging service, such as Slack.
As you would want to respond to queries in a timely manner, you could set this scenario to run every 30 minutes, with a limit of 20 form entries for each scenario run.
This would at minimum consume 48 credits (no queries from customers), with a maximum of 1008 (if you get 20 queries every 30 minutes).
Conclusion: a solution here would be to schedule this for your office hours, which would greatly reduce the credit usage!
Bulk move data from Airtable to Google Sheets
Within an Airtable project there are 30 bundles of information that need to be quickly exported to a spreadsheet.
You only need to perform this task once, so you don’t need to schedule the scenario. Instead you would use the Run once option.
As there are 30 bundles of information to move, the scenario will consume 31 credits in total:
- 1 credit to generate the bundle (source)
- and 30 separate credits for each row to be added
Conclusion: run this scenario once.
TABBED SEQUENCE LANDSCAPE INTRO TEXT
An important part of counting your credits is having a clear oversight of every credit consumed. Check runs will allow you to do this.
What are check runs?
By default within Make, the history tab shows you when a scenario was executed, edited, rescheduled and provide any errors / warnings. It will also include check runs.
Definition: A check run shows when a scheduled scenario was executed, but only the trigger module was activated and it doesn’t find any new data.
For example:
- You were watching a form for submissions, and the scenario executed.
- There were no forms to process, but the scenario still consumes one credit.
Check runs will therefore provide you with a complete oversight of each time your scenario is executed, the operations performed and the credits consumed.
How do I view this?
Click Menu → Scenario → Select any scenario → History tab.
Click the ... in the top right hand corner.
Then toggle Hide check runs.
Note: If you do only want to see when a scenario was executed, you can click Hide check runs from within the history tab. You can find this in the top right hand corner of the page.
Show me an example
Using the scenario from earlier in this course as an example; it watches forms, creates a document, downloads a file and sends an email.
The scenario consists of the following modules:
- Google Forms (Watch Responses)
- Google Docs (Create a Document)
- Google Drive (Download a File)
- Gmail (Send an email)
If this is scheduled to run every 15 minutes, once there are no more forms remaining to process, it will continue to try and run the scenario, consuming one credit each time.
Why is this useful?
Check runs will provide a clear insight into your credit count, and this will help influence your decisions on how you consume your credits and manage your scenarios.
- You can start to consume less credits if you know that the scenario does not need to be executed every 15 minutes.
- The worst that can happen here is that the scenario is left running without any attention and consumes 600+ credits in the background over a week, without returning any useful data.
- Having an oversight of how your scenario is performing may influence your scheduling. You may decide to schedule the scenario once per day, saving yourself a lot of credits.
- Hide/show check runs can also help you filter out scenario runs that did not return any records. This helps you remove the clutter of those runs that didn’t find any new or updated data.
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This concludes the final unit of this course. Great work!
By now you should have an understanding of:
- how to plan credit usage within a scenario
- how to use the History/Details function to review scenario activity
- how to schedule a scenario effectively to optimize credit use
You should now proceed to the final Check your learning unit, before attempting your Make Foundation assessment.