Cost Observability: Understanding Actions and Usage

Understanding what consumes your plan's action quota is essential for managing costs and scaling your automation work predictably. This article explains how Chase Agents counts actions, what your limits are, and how to keep visibility over usage.

What Is an Action?

An action in Chase Agents is a tool execution performed through a connection. Every time an automation or an AI Agent calls a tool on one of your MCP connections, that counts as one action. For example: fetching rows from a database is one action; sending a Slack message is one action; creating a record in your CRM is one action. Actions are the primary unit of consumption billing on Chase Agents.

Trial Actions

Every new workspace starts with 50 free trial actions. These are shared across all automations and agents in the workspace. The trial period lasts 7 days from workspace creation. During the trial you have full access to all platform features; the only constraint is the 50-action limit. Once you exhaust your trial actions or the 7-day period ends, you will need to upgrade to a paid plan to continue executing tools through your connections.

What Does Not Count as an Action

Not all activity consumes actions. The following do not count toward your action quota: AI reasoning and text generation within the platform (the LLM calls that power your agents and automations); running sandboxed Python code via run_sandboxed_code steps; creating, editing, or deleting automations; opening chat sessions with agents; and viewing workflow history or audit logs.

Monitoring Usage

Workspace admins can view current action consumption from the workspace settings panel. The usage display shows total actions consumed in the current billing period, actions remaining, and your plan's included limit. You can also see action counts broken down by automation or by connection, which helps identify which workflows are the highest consumers.

Active Automation Limits

In addition to action counts, plans also limit the number of automations that can be active at the same time. The Starter plan allows one active automation. Paid plans include higher limits that scale with the plan tier. Automations that are disabled do not count against this limit; only enabled automations that are eligible to run (via schedule, webhook, or manual trigger) count.

Team Seats

Each workspace includes a number of seats that determines how many users can be members. The default number of seats included with each workspace is 3. Additional seats can be added via the billing panel. Each paid member occupies one seat. Workspace owners and admins are included in the seat count.

Optimizing Action Consumption

To get the most out of your action quota, consider batching read operations: instead of fetching records one at a time in a loop, fetch them all in a single call and process them in a run_sandboxed_code step. Also review automations that run on frequent schedules and ensure they are actually producing value at that frequency. Reducing an automation from running every minute to every five minutes can cut its action consumption by 80 percent.

Billing Dimensions

Chase Agents billing is structured around four dimensions: Actions (tool executions through connections), Automation Runs (each triggered execution of an automation regardless of how many steps it contains), Active Automations (the number of enabled automations in your workspace), and Team Seats (the number of workspace members). Your plan defines the included quota for each dimension. Visit the pricing page for current plan details and limits.