---
title: "Credits"
description: "Credits meter Maestro's own AI spending, not your work. Three operations cost anything; everything else is free."
canonical: "https://help.sitesmojo.com/kb/credits/"
---

Credits meter **Maestro's own AI usage** — the models we pay for on your
behalf. They are an abuse cap, not a usage tax.

They do not meter you driving your own Claude through the tools to do your own
work. Board items, comments, reads, knowledge, code-graph queries and workspace
docs are database operations that cost us nothing, so they cost you nothing.
Use the board as hard as you like.

## What costs anything

Three operations, because only three spend our AI budget:

| Cost | Operation | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 50 | `start_build` | Dispatches a real agent run — actual model tokens |
| 5 | `file_request` | Routes to the orchestrator, which dispatches agents |
| 10 | `codegraph_index` | Embeds every docstring and signature in a repo |

**Everything else is free**, including every board tool, every read, all the
knowledge tools, `codegraph_search`, workspace docs, and all project, agent and
membership management. An operation not in that table costs zero.

## Checking your balance

Ask Claude to call `whoami()` — the reply carries `workspace.credits`. In the
portal it is **Settings → Usage** under the user-chip menu, which also breaks
down what you have spent by operation and shows the recent ledger.

Every workspace gets 1000 credits when it is created.

## Two things that surprise people

**Deductions are charged to your workspace**, not to the project you are
operating on. If you are building in someone else's project, your balance is
the one that moves.

**Project pages show no credits at all.** A project's ledger holds nothing but
its creation grant, because nothing ever debits it. That absence is deliberate,
not a missing feature.