Notion AI Credits vs ActiveCampaign and Peec: 500 Buys 3 Tasks or 500

In October, 3 vendors landed on the same number, and it buys wildly different amounts of work. At Notion, 500 credits covers 3 complex tasks on a hand-picked model. At ActiveCampaign, the same 500 covers about 500 email template jobs. So "500 AI credits" tells you nothing until you divide it by a burn rate, and Peec does not publish one.

What 500 AI credits buys at each vendor

AI credits per seat look comparable only because the number matches. Divide 500 by the published rates and the range runs from 3 tasks to about 500. The short answer: 500 credits buys 3 to 10 Opus 5.5 tasks at Notion, 33 to 500 typical jobs at ActiveCampaign, and 125 to 500 agent runs at Pipefy. Peec publishes no absolute rate.

The table below is the original work in this post. Every rate comes from a vendor page opened on 6 November 2026. Every result is our own division, rounded down, because a half-finished task is not a task. Each rate is the vendor's estimate, and actual use varies with the size of the job.

Tasks differ by vendor, so read each row against its own task. Pipefy adds 0.5 credit for web search or calculations. Notion's 1,500 Standard credits are a separate pool, covered in the next section.

Notion AI credits: 500 is the smaller of 2 pools

Notion's 500 is only part of the allowance, and it is the part built to run out. Notion's 19 October announcement gives each Business and Enterprise seat 1,500 Standard credits and 500 Select credits a month. The system went live that day for new customers, and existing customers moved on 2 November.

The pools are not interchangeable. Standard covers work where Notion picks the model, including its Notion Agent on Auto, writing, translation and AI blocks. Select covers picking a model yourself and running Custom Agents you set up. Neither pool rolls over, and neither can be moved between members.

Notion's estimates put a simple task at 5 credits on Auto against 50 on Opus 5.5. A medium task is 10 against 85. A complex task is 25 against 150. So the Standard pool buys 300 simple, 150 medium or 60 complex tasks on Auto, while the Select pool buys 10, 5 or 3 on Opus 5.5.

Select credits are a steering mechanism

I read the Select pool as product design more than generosity. Notion's Auto help page says Auto's average cost to run was 87% lower than Opus 5.5, and the allowance passes that gap straight to the user. Pick a model by hand for 3 complex jobs and your month of Select is gone. The default then feels free, and the choice feels expensive.

That is a defensible design, and I would copy it. Notion says the vast majority of users are unlikely to run out, and for those users the steering costs nothing. The buyers who should worry are the ones whose teams insist on choosing a named model, because that habit is what this meter prices.

Custom Agents share that Select pool. Notion's run estimates are quoted per 1,000 Notion credits, and Select is a separate balance, so this next conversion rests on an assumption. If a Select credit burns like a Notion credit, 500 covers roughly 28 to 66 status updates or 16 to 50 daily briefs. A daily brief every day of a 30-day month only fits in the top half of that range. The run-by-run economics sit in our comparison of Notion Custom Agents with Copilot Studio and Glean.

The next cut lands on 1 December

From 1 December 2026, AI Meeting Notes starts drawing from Standard credits at about 10 credits for a 1-hour meeting. Assume a member sits through 80 recorded 1-hour meetings a month. That takes 800 of the 1,500 credits, or 53%, and it leaves room for 140 simple Auto tasks rather than 300. The seat price and the allowance both stay the same, which is the pattern we described in how AI vendors cut limits without touching price.

ActiveCampaign AI credits: 500 for the whole plan

ActiveCampaign gives every plan the same 500, and that flat number treats a Starter account and an Enterprise account alike. The pricing page lists 500 Active Intelligence credits on Starter, Plus, Pro and Enterprise. Its pages describe no per-user split, so everyone on the account appears to draw on one balance. Included credits reset monthly and do not carry over.

The timing is visible in dated records. ActiveCampaign's credit FAQ was created on 16 October 2026 and last edited on 5 November. A third-party capture dated 23 October shows the 500 row, against an August capture where Starter and Plus only said limits apply.

Enhanced work spends credits without asking

The easiest detail to miss is a column header. ActiveCampaign's usage table lists enhanced core work as "Enabled Automatically". That covers about 1 to 3 credits to create or refine a campaign and about 5 to 15 for an automation or a performance report. The basic versions of the same actions cost 0.

So the allowance can drain on routine work nobody chose to meter. I think the design is fair for interactive use, because core capabilities drop to their standard versions at zero rather than stopping. Scheduled work is different. ActiveCampaign says core capabilities run as scheduled tasks pause when credits run out. If a weekly report matters, a balance of zero stops it, so a Starter account needs a low-balance alarm more than it needs more credits.

Translated sends scale with your list

Two advanced actions bill per contact, and this is where 500 stops being a large number. A translated campaign and an AI action in an automation each cost 0.04 credits per contact. We read that as per contact per send, although the article does not spell it out.

At 1,000 contacts, a translated send costs 40 credits, so you get 12 a month. At 5,000 contacts you get 2. At 12,500 you get 1. The allowance is identical on all 4 plans, so it covers the smallest accounts well and larger lists poorly, and larger lists are the ones most likely to want translation.

AI actions fail differently. At zero credits, contacts skip the AI action and continue through the automation. Nothing visibly breaks, and a personalised step quietly stops being personalised. I would treat that as the most important line in the whole article, because a silent skip is harder to catch than a pause.

Peec AI credits: 500 with no published burn rate

Peec is the 1 vendor here whose 500 cannot be converted into tasks, and it says so. Peec's pricing page lists 500 agent credits on Starter, 750 on Pro and 1,000 on Advanced. A tracker's diff first saw that row between its 19 October and 26 October captures. Starter lists at $95 a month, and the balance belongs to the company.

Peec's agent documentation says each answer consumes a different number of credits depending on complexity, which is why it shows a balance rather than a question count. What it does publish is relative. High quality uses about 2 times the credits of Normal, and Max uses about 3 to 5 times. Whatever a Normal month buys, a Max month buys a fifth to a third of it.

The word also covers 2 different things. Peec's tracking credits follow a formula, 1 prompt on 1 model for 1 day equals 1 credit, and they are separate from agent credits. Using the agent never reduces prompt tracking. If a Peec rep quotes you "credits", ask which kind.

The launch bonus hides the real allowance

Your first month will not tell you what the allowance feels like. Peec gives new companies up to 5,000 additional agent credits during their first 24 hours, and companies subscribed at launch got a one-time 5,000, valid for 30 days. That is 10 times Starter's monthly number. A team that forms habits on the bonus meets 500 afterwards with no warning from its own experience.

Running out is at least clean. The agent stops, and there are no automatic overage charges. The catch is the step size. The smallest add-on is 5,000 credits a month, also 10 times Starter's allowance, and the price appears only before you confirm the purchase. I would want that price in writing before signing an annual Starter plan.

Pipefy credits per run: a promotion ended, and 2 became 3

Pipefy's change is real, but "Pipefy raised credits per run" overstates it. Pipefy launched its 3 models on 13 July 2026. Its help page says Pro would consume 2 credits as a promotional offer until 8 October and 3 from 9 October. Standard stays at 2 and Lite at 1, and the date was announced in advance.

That does not make it harmless. A 500 pack moves from 250 Pro runs to 166, a third fewer, and each Pro run now costs 50% more in credits. Any pilot costed between July and October at the 2-credit rate understates Pro by that 50%. I would rerun that spreadsheet today, because the number your CFO approved came from a promotional meter.

The 500 here is also not an allowance. Pipefy's page says each contracted plan includes 1,000 one-time credits, with extra packages of 500, 1,000, 10,000 or 50,000. At 3 credits, 1,000 buys 333 Pro runs, which is 11 runs a day for 30 days and then nothing.

Add-ons and model choices move the run rate

The per-run number is a floor. Document analysis adds 1 credit, and web search or calculations each add 0.5, on every model. A Standard run with web search costs 2.5, so 500 buys 200. A Pro run with document analysis costs 4, so 500 buys 125. Max Effort switches on Pro and its charge automatically.

The model is chosen per behaviour, and an agent can hold up to 5 behaviours. Neither page says whether 1 trigger firing several behaviours bills once per behaviour, so test it on 1 record before you build a forecast on it. Runs that never execute cost nothing, and a run with a partial error is still billed.

AI credits per seat is the wrong comparison

The unit attached to the 500 changes the answer as much as the burn rate does. A 20-member Notion workspace holds 10,000 Select credits on paper, yet 1 heavy user still stops at 500 because the pool cannot be shared. An ActiveCampaign account of the same size holds 500 in total. The controller's problem in why credits and tokens slow AI purchasing starts here: the same line item means different things on different invoices.

AI credit pricing: a 10x gap per credit

Credits have no shared exchange rate, and the 2 public prices prove it. Notion credits cost $10 per 1,000 on monthly billing and $13 per 1,000 on annual, so $0.01 to $0.013 each. ActiveCampaign packs of 100 start at $10 a month, so $0.10 each. Replacing 500 credits costs $5 at Notion and at least $50 at ActiveCampaign.

The trap is reading that as "ActiveCampaign is 10 times more expensive". It is not, because a credit buys more there. An automation job tops out near 15 credits, or $1.50. A complex Opus 5.5 task at Notion is about 150 credits, also $1.50. A 10x gap in credit price and a 10x gap in burn cancel out in that pairing. We found the same pattern when pricing tasks across the Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft meters.

The Notion row assumes an Opus 5.5 task burns the same number of Notion credits as Select credits. Notion treats them as separate balances and does not state the equivalence. Its Standard pool has no paid extension: those features pause until reset.

Where this comparison is weakest

This table compares vendor estimates, and we did not run a single task on any of these products. The Notion rates carry the note that actual use may vary. ActiveCampaign says usage depends on the size and complexity of what you ask for and reserves the right to change rates. A live test on your own workload outranks every number here.

The 3-task figure is a worst published case

The headline's lower bound uses the only model rate Notion publishes for Select, and Opus 5.5 is one of the pricier routes. Cheaper hand-picked models should stretch 500 further, and Notion publishes no rates for them. So 3 complex tasks is a floor on published data, not a typical month. Notion's claim that most users will not run out may well be correct, and Notion has the usage data that we lack.

The tasks also are not comparable. A complex Notion task and a Pipefy agent run are not the same work, so the 166-fold range measures how loosely "credit" is defined rather than which vendor is good value. If you already use only 1 of these products, the cross-vendor range is irrelevant and the row for your task is what counts. Pricing the same 5 design tasks on 3 meters is a stronger method when the tasks do match, and the tasks here do not allow it.

Some sourcing is weaker too. Peec's date rests on a third-party tracker, as does the before state at ActiveCampaign. Pipefy's pricing page refused our fetch, so pack prices may be public somewhere we could not see. Peec's Enterprise allowance is "Custom" on its pricing page and 3,000 in its docs, so we left it out.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start: divide before you compare

Take your 3 most frequent AI tasks and write each one down with a monthly count. Multiply by the vendor's published rate, using the top of any range, and compare the total with the allowance in the unit it is actually sold. If a vendor publishes no rate, as with Peec, run 20 typical jobs on the default setting and divide the balance change by 20. Do that after any launch bonus is gone.

Then ask each vendor 1 question in writing: what stops working at zero, and does anyone get told? ActiveCampaign's silent skip and Notion's December meeting change both sit in help pages, not on the pricing table. Add a monthly burn check and a rate-change notice to your renewal terms, using the AI contract clauses that matter more than discount as your starting draft.

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