Make Credits Explained: The Full Price Ladder

A credit is Make's unit of billed work, and the conversion is now printed on Make's own pricing page in a single sentence: "Each module action in your scenario, like adding a Google Sheet row or fetching Gmail account data, counts as one credit." That is the rule. Every paid Make plan is sold as a monthly allowance of credits, and each action a module performs draws one credit from it.

Treat this as news, not background. For a stretch after Make moved to credit pricing, the page did not state how credits mapped to the modules you build — The Bot Desk has an older piece saying exactly that, accurate when written and not now. The rate is published, and it is one-to-one.

What the sentence settles, and what it does not

The sentence covers "each module action." A module that adds a row, sends a message, fetches a record, or updates a field is doing an action, and that action is one credit. Ten modules that each fire once cost ten credits; the same ten modules across 500 runs cost 5,000. There is no per-plan multiplier in the published wording: a credit on Core is the same unit of work as a credit on Teams.

What the sentence does not settle is how Make meters the parts of a scenario that are not obviously "actions." The trigger module at the top is the big one. So are routers, filters and iterators — flow-control pieces that direct or split data rather than call an external service. The page as read on 8 September 2026 does not say whether a trigger draws a credit, whether a filter that blocks a bundle costs anything, or whether an iterator that fans out 50 items charges once or fifty times. The pricing page read that day does not resolve it, so ask Make in writing before you budget a scenario with an iterator in it.

Confirm trigger and flow-control metering with Make in writing before you budget tightly. The examples below show both readings side by side: on a five-module scenario the ambiguity is worth 20% of the bill.

Worked example one: a lead intake scenario

Take a common build. A trigger watches for a new form submission, then four modules run: search the CRM for an existing contact, create or update that contact, send a notification email, and append a row to a Google Sheet. That is one trigger and four action modules.

Now put volume on it. Say the form is submitted 500 times a month. If the trigger counts as a module action, each run is 5 credits: 5 × 500 = 2,500 credits a month. If it does not, each run is 4 credits: 4 × 500 = 2,000 credits a month. The unresolved question is worth 500 credits, or 500 ÷ 2,500 = 20% of the higher figure.

Either number blows past the Free plan's 1,000-credit cap: at 5 credits a run, 1,000 ÷ 5 = 200 runs and you are done. The cheapest paid home is the 10,000-credit tier — Core at $10 a month billed monthly, $9 billed annually — which leaves 10,000 − 2,500 = 7,500 credits of headroom for a second and third scenario.

Worked example two: order sync, and what happens when it grows

A busier build. A trigger watches for new orders, then six modules follow: fetch the customer record, create an invoice, update an inventory sheet, post to Slack, add the customer to an email list, and write a record to a data store. That is one trigger plus six actions, so 7 credits a run on the inclusive reading.

At 40 orders a day across a 30-day month, that is 40 × 30 = 1,200 runs, so 7 × 1,200 = 8,400 credits. Add a daily digest scenario — a trigger plus three modules, so 4 credits, once a day — and that is 4 × 30 = 120 credits. Total: 8,400 + 120 = 8,520 credits a month. That fits the 10,000 tier with 10,000 − 8,520 = 1,480 credits spare, or 14.8% headroom. On Core billed monthly, $10 a month. Fine, until the business grows.

Push the same build to 6,000 orders a month: 7 × 6,000 = 42,000 credits, plus the digest, for 42,120. The slider stops captured on 8 September 2026 are 10k, 20k, 40k, 80k, 150k, 300k, 500k, 750k and 1M; the selector continues above that. There is no 45,000 stop. The 40,000 stop is short by 2,120 credits, so you buy 80,000, and on Core billed monthly that moves you from $34 to $64.

You would then be using 42,120 ÷ 80,000 = 52.7% of what you bought. The sticker rate at that stop is $64 ÷ 80,000 × 1,000 = $0.80 per 1,000 credits, but your effective rate on credits consumed is $64 ÷ 42,120 × 1,000 = $1.52 per 1,000, nearly double. With stops this coarse, the credit to watch is the first one past a stop.

The full price ladder, billed monthly

These are the published USD prices per month at each credit tier, as read on 8 September 2026. Enterprise is custom-priced and is not on the slider.

Divide price by credits and the unit rate falls as you climb. On Core billed monthly: $10 ÷ 10,000 = $1.00 per 1,000 credits at the entry stop, $34 ÷ 40,000 = $0.85, $64 ÷ 80,000 = $0.80, and $214 ÷ 300,000 = $0.71 at Core's top stop. At the entry stop Pro is $18 ÷ 10,000 = $1.80 per 1,000 and Teams is $34 ÷ 10,000 = $3.40.

Data transfer scales with the tier rather than being sold separately. Make's page states: "5 GB of data transfers per 10,000 monthly credits." So the 40,000 stop carries 40,000 ÷ 10,000 × 5 = 20 GB, the 150,000 stop carries 75 GB, and the 1,000,000 stop carries 500 GB.

Core disappears above 300,000 credits

Read the table's bottom three rows again. Core is offered at every stop up to 300,000 credits, then it stops. At 500,000, 750,000 and 1,000,000 the only options published are Pro and Teams. That is a forced plan change, not just a bigger bill.

Price it out. A Core customer at 300,000 credits pays $214 a month. Cross into 500,000 and the cheapest published option is Pro at $482 — that is $482 − $214 = $268 more, an increase of 268 ÷ 214 = 125.2%. Per credit the direction reverses on you: Core at its top stop is $214 ÷ 300,000 = $0.000713, while Pro at 500,000 is $482 ÷ 500,000 = $0.000964. That is $0.000964 ÷ $0.000713 = 1.351, so 35.1% more per credit than before you scaled. Volume discounts normally run the other way. If you are on Core and heading toward 300,000, treat that ceiling as a planning date.

Checking "Save 15% or more" against Make's own numbers

The annual billing toggle advertises "Save 15% or more." Here are the annual prices, shown as monthly figures, at the stops captured on 8 September 2026.

The discount is (monthly − annual) ÷ monthly. Every division is below, so you can check each one.

Eleven of the thirteen published pairs land between 14.5% and 15.2%, which is the claim working as advertised. Two do not: Core at 10,000 credits saves 10.0%, and Pro at 10,000 credits saves 11.1%. Those are the two cheapest paid entry points on the ladder, and the ones a small business is most likely to buy first.

The likely reason is not sinister. Make prices in whole dollars: on a $10 plan a true 15% discount is $1.50, and the only whole-dollar moves are $1 (10%) or $2 (20%). On an $18 plan they are $2 (11.1%) or $3 (16.7%). But "or more" reads as a floor, and at the entry tier it is not one — if you pick annual billing at 10,000 credits to capture 15%, the real saving is $12 a year on Core ($1 × 12) and $24 on Pro ($2 × 12). Decide on those numbers, not the banner.

What the Free plan gives you

Free is published as 1,000 credits a month, with a 15-minute minimum interval between runs, a maximum of 2 active scenarios, a 5-minute maximum scenario execution time, 512MB, and 7 days of execution log storage.

Two of those limits bite before the credit cap does. A 15-minute minimum interval caps a scheduled scenario at 4 runs an hour, and 2 active scenarios will not hold the handful of small automations most real workloads need. The 1,000 credits are usable for evaluation — 200 runs of the lead scenario above, if the trigger counts, and 250 if it does not — but Free is a proving ground, not an operating tier. Core adds unlimited active scenarios, 1-minute scheduling, more data transfer and Make API access. Pro adds priority scenario execution, custom variables and full-text execution log search. Teams adds teams and team roles plus shareable scenario templates. Enterprise is custom-priced, so there is no published figure to give you.

How to budget this without guessing

Count the modules in each scenario, multiply by expected monthly runs, add the scenarios together. That total is your credit requirement, and the tables above turn it into a monthly price in one lookup. Then do two things the pricing page will not.

First, ask Make directly whether triggers, filters, routers and iterators consume credits, and get it in writing. That treatment is worth 20% of the bill on the five-module scenario above; with heavy iteration it is worth far more, because an iterator that fans a bundle into 50 items and runs three modules on each is either 3 credits or 150, depending on an answer nobody has published.

Second, size against the next stop up, not the one you fit today. The 300,000-credit Core ceiling is a cliff rather than a step. Budget with a stop in hand and the model is predictable; budget to the edge of your tier and the first busy month moves you a stop, and possibly a plan.