Credits are the currency of CircleCI. Credits are purchased up-front and are used to pay for CircleCI platform usage in real time. Platform usage consists of:
Monthly active users - By using credits to pay for monthly active users, your organization is never restricted to a static number of active users each month.
Compute time - Each resource type on CircleCI has an associated credit/minute price. Your credits are used in real time whenever your organization is actively using a compute resource on CircleCI.
Add-on features - Some features of CircleCI have additional credit costs associated with them. These costs may be represented in credits per use or in credits per minute.
Additional network & storage use - network and storage utilization beyond the plan-specified thresholds is charged at 420 credits/GB.