Credits and usage
Credits are Magister's unit of AI and tool work—roughly one cent of internal usage. Connect meters supported MCP tools; Agent meters hosted model and tool usage. The complete request, not just a single visible tool call, determines actual usage.
Typical complete-request ranges
- General chat: 20–50 credits
- Social post: 30–100 credits
- Keyword research: 30–150 credits
- Website publish: 50–125 credits
- Influencer discovery: 50–150 credits
- Image generation: 30–100 credits
- Video generation: 80–250 credits
- AI-visibility refresh: 75–200 credits
- Plan compile: 100–250 credits
- Audit: 125–300 credits
These are estimates, not fixed fees. Task complexity, context length, model, and tool loop all matter. Full audits and plan builds started from the dashboard are included and do not draw from a paid Connect tool balance.
Where to see usage — organization owners and admins can open Organization Settings → Billing. The page shows:
- Your current plan and how many brands it includes
- Included, rolled-over, used, and remaining credits
- A plan-aware Usage Breakdown: MCP tools and brands for Connect, or models and brands for Agent
- Credit grants and estimated spend routed through your own API keys
- Overage settings
Connect tool usage — Connect lists each metered MCP tool, its run count, its brand, and the credits consumed. Your external assistant's own model billing is not reported as Magister usage.
Agent spend by model — Agent lists each hosted model with request count and cost. Expensive models consume credits faster than lightweight models.
Reconciliation timing — some hosted model usage can arrive 24–72 hours after the original Agent request. Recent totals are estimates until provider usage finishes reconciling.
Spend by brand — if your organization has multiple brands, you'll see per-brand totals so you can see which brand is driving usage.
Monthly refresh and rollover — on current paid plans, included credits refresh every month whether the subscription is paid monthly or annually. Unused included credits roll into the next monthly credit period up to one closing period's fresh allowance, including paid brand and seat allowance. Older grandfathered plans may not receive rollover. Free-trial credits are one-time rather than monthly rollover credits.
Overage settings — overage costs $0.02 per credit. If overage is off, metered Connect tools pause at the limit. On Agent, text work falls back to GPT-5.6 Luna while paid image, voice, video, and screenshot tools pause. If overage is on, normal usage can continue. On current plans, the setting is an additional-credit allowance: for example, 500 credits authorizes up to $10 of additional usage.
When you hit the limit — Connect returns a clear limit message to the connected assistant with a link to Organization Settings → Billing. Agent shows the same explanation in chat with a billing-settings link. Only owners and admins can change overages.
Charges and allowance — setting an allowance is not an upfront credit purchase; only credits actually used are billed. When overage is first enabled in a monthly credit period, its separate meter starts at 0, and usage recorded while overage was off does not consume the new allowance. Raising the allowance keeps the credits already used and adds more room. Leave the allowance blank for no additional cap. Overage is settled incrementally to the saved Stripe payment method and may create separate invoices during the period rather than waiting for renewal.
BYOK and credits — organizations with a hosted Agent project can configure supported provider keys for hosted models. Eligible hosted requests are billed by the provider and do not consume Magister credits. Standalone Connect does not use Magister BYOK; its external assistant's model bill is separate from Magister tool credits. Free cannot use provider keys.
Who can access billing — only organization owners and organization admins can open Organization Billing and change overage settings.