Can't upgrade AI Credits

Something in the system changed and I got it through. Still confused as to the usage of credits though for the month.

Hey ​@KyleHart , credits are allocated based on your billing cycle date. If your billing date is June 10th then new credits appear on July 10th and so on. Sorry for the confusion!

So that means that once you are out, you cant buy and use any more until the following month? thats crazy,  you are missing a tonne of revenue there making us wait till next month (and there is a likelyhood I will program something exteranlly)

​@CKARC Plans come with a certain number of credits but you can buy additional credit packs if you run out! You just need to be on the Teams plan or above to buy a credit pack, but some folks might choose to just wait the few days for their new credits appear. Here’s a help article explaining the AI credits system!

I am on the teams plan and higher, but if you buy more, you cant use them till the month kicks over. Why and how does Airtable expect that you should stop your entire business, and all the work you do . .to wait till airtable “lets you” use AI again. I am wanting to spend money and use AI but I cant and now I have to change platforms to a completely different competitive tool just to keep working?

​@CKARC 

Oh wow, that is nuts. I don’t think that any of us Airtable consultants realized that purchasing more “monthly AI credits” doesn’t go into effect until the next billing cycle begins!

And if you’re on an annual billing plan, what that means is that it could take up to a year for your additional “monthly AI credits” to be added to your plan!

To test this out, I just tried upgrading my “monthly AI credits”, and it told me that my additional “monthly AI credits” won’t kick in until my annual billing cycle resets — which is 9 months from now!

So if you’re on an annual plan, this becomes a double problem — you still have to wait until next month for your “monthly AI credits” to reset, but then you’re still likely to run out of credits every single month until your annual plan resets.

Like you said, that effectively shuts down an entire business from running their business.

You may want to email support@airtable.com to see if they can give you more AI credits for this month.

I would also let Airtable know that this entire billing situation needs to be fixed by filling out their feature request form here. 

In the meantime, my #1 best recommendation would be to rebuild all of your AI automations with Make’s advanced automations and integrations, which lets you integrate Airtable with OpenAI (ChatGPT), Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, or any other AI tool that you’d like.

Not only are Make’s automations infinitely more powerful & customizable than Airtable’s automations, but best of all, you will never run out of AI credits with Make because you can always pay for more AI credits that kick in instantly.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the many different ways that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld