n8n has added the ability to top up n8n Assistant credits on n8n Cloud's Starter and Pro plans. Previously, exhausting the monthly Assistant credit allowance meant waiting for the reset on the 1st of the month or upgrading to a higher plan — a problem n8n says was one of the most common complaints since Assistant launched.
Accounts still get a monthly allowance that resets each month. Top-ups are additional, optional credits layered on top, available two ways: a one-off manual purchase of a credit package, or an auto top-up that triggers at a chosen low-balance threshold and refills to a chosen target, capped by a monthly spending limit that is on by default. The Assistant draws down included credits first and only uses extra credits once those run out. Purchased extra credits carry over month to month and expire 12 months after purchase.
A new Assistant credits tab in the Cloud admin dashboard shows the account's balance (split into included and extra credits), a spend chart over 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days, which users on the instance are consuming the most credits, and a top-up history. Inside the editor, the Assistant panel now shows credit usage for the current conversation and warns when a conversation is down to 10% of available credits.
Alongside the top-up feature, n8n recalculated monthly allowances for Starter and Pro plans. The company says most users will see their allowance go further, attributing this to moving everyone onto a newer, more capable model that needs fewer credits per task, standardizing the value of a credit across all paid plans now that credits can be purchased, and unspecified internal optimizations to how the Assistant operates.
n8n published rough credit-cost ranges for typical requests: a quick question uses 10-20 credits, a simple one-prompt workflow or fix uses 50-100 credits, and a larger build with explicit testing or a longer debugging session uses 300-600 credits. The company cautions these are rough guides, since costs vary with prompt specificity and non-deterministic model behavior.
Other details: credits are shared across an entire n8n instance, so all users on a team draw from one pool; only the instance owner can initiate a top-up, and an active paid plan is required to do so; running a workflow never consumes Assistant credits, only conversations with the Assistant do; Assistant credits are separate from Gateway credits, which pay for AI model calls made by running workflows and agents; free trials get a one-time allowance of 800 credits with no top-ups available until upgrading to a paid plan; and self-hosted n8n does not use Assistant credits at all, instead billing through the user's own model provider account.