Academy
8. Tips to Keep Costs Low
Apply practical strategies — automatic model selection, clear briefs, knowledge bases over pasting, and temporary chats — to minimize credit consumption.
Every action on OUPI — a chat message, an image generation, an agent mission — costs credits based on the resources it actually consumes. Text costs depend on the number of tokens exchanged multiplied by the weight of the model you use: frontier (top-tier) models cost far more per token than fast (lightweight) ones. Media is priced per generation depending on engine and output size or duration. Agent missions add up all model calls and tool uses across their work rounds. The good news: you are never charged for an operation that fails, and costs are always shown so you can learn what is expensive.
Let automatic model selection do the work. When you don't manually pick a model, OUPI favors lighter, cheaper models for routine tasks and only escalates to heavier ones when the complexity demands it. For most everyday questions this saves credits with no noticeable quality loss.
Write a clear, specific brief for every mission. Vague goals force the agent to run extra rounds of reasoning and tool use, each of which costs credits. A well-defined outcome means fewer rounds and a lower bill. As the platform itself says: a clear brief is the cheapest optimization.
Store long or reusable documents in a knowledge base instead of pasting them into the chat. Pasted text inflates the token count of every message in the conversation, while a knowledge base lets the model retrieve only the relevant parts — dramatically cutting token usage.
Use temporary chats for throwaway questions. A persistent conversation accumulates context (and therefore tokens) over time. If you only need a quick answer, a temporary chat keeps the token count minimal and avoids bloating future messages.
Open the Missions page and look at the cost shown on one of your recent missions. Compare a mission where you gave a detailed brief with one where the goal was vague. Notice the difference in rounds and total credits consumed — this builds your intuition for what is expensive.
Four habits keep your credit spend low: (1) let automatic selection choose the lightest model that fits the task, (2) write clear, specific briefs so missions finish in fewer rounds, (3) use knowledge bases instead of pasting long documents, and (4) reach for temporary chats when you don't need a lasting conversation. Check mission costs regularly to sharpen your sense of what consumes the most — and remember, you're never charged for a failed operation.