Tool Usage & Credits
How Skill tools consume your monthly credit allowance
How Skills Are Metered
Every Skill — speech-to-text, text-to-speech, image understanding, and image generation — draws down the same monthly credit allowance as chat completions. There are no separate per-Skill quotas: a Skill call consumes credits from your plan's allowance just like any other request.
For how the credit allowance and pay-as-you-go overage work, see Credits & Usage.
Available Skills
| Skill | Tool |
|---|---|
| Speech-to-Text (ASR) | audio_transcribe |
| Text-to-Speech (TTS) | audio_synthesize |
| Image Understanding | image_describe |
| Image Generation | image_generate, image_edit, image_upscale, image_background_remove |
enhance_prompt on image_generate does not consume a second Image Generation
call — one request is one call against the quota. It does draw credits of its
own, on its own usage line.
All Skills are available on every plan tier — nothing is locked behind a paywall. Higher tiers simply grant a larger monthly credit allowance.
Monitoring Skill Usage
There's no separate Skills view — a Skill call shows up alongside chat
completions wherever your usage is tracked: Studio's Usage page
(/studio/settings/usage) for your overall credit balance, and each key's
Activity tab (/studio/api/keys/:id) for the per-request log, where the
Tool column names the Skill (asr, tts, image_generate, etc.). When the period's allowance
and your prepaid balance are both exhausted, further calls —
Skill or chat — return 429 until the allowance resets. See
Credits & Usage.
Skills vs. Rate Limits
Credit consumption is separate from request rate limits:
- Rate limits cap requests within a 4-hour burst window.
- Credits govern your total monthly volume, weighted by per-model cost.
Both apply independently to Skill calls and chat completions alike.