Credits and usage visibility for Hex Agents

Since we launched the Hex Agent last fall, it’s become the most capable analytics agent on the market. Every month, companies from startups to Fortune 500s trust the Hex Agent with millions of business-critical data tasks.

Agents have actually become the primary mode of working in Hex, surpassing manual notebook cell creation and point-and-click exploration.

Now, we’re introducing a credit model that allows us to continue providing this experience, along with new ways to monitor usage and purchase add-on credits.

How it works

Hex plans now come with a monthly credit grant for every paid user:

• Professional Editor seats include 30 monthly credits
• Team Editor seats include 40 monthly credits
• Enterprise Editor seats include 60 monthly credits
• Explorer seats include 10 monthly credits

For more usage, Admins can purchase pooled add-on credits with auto top-ups that refill your balance as-needed. There’s also an option to set a monthly spend limit so you always stay within budget. Full details are in the docs.

Existing customers will automatically move to this model with a grace period (annual contracts will need to be updated). New customers automatically start on this model.

Effort-based consumption

Hex agents use credits based on effort — the complexity of the task, the amount of context the agent needs to process, and the resources required to complete it.

This means simple questions cost very little, while more involved analyses cost more. A few illustrative examples:

One big focus area for us is cost efficiency. We’re constantly evaluating frontier and lower-cost models, choosing models that strike the best balance of accuracy and cost.

We do this at a per-task level, too, using our subagent architecture. For example, some lower-cost models are already at parity with frontier models on search or simple data viz – so we direct traffic to those cheaper models, and reserve the expensive ones for jobs where their performance is worth the premium.

The result: your credits go further over time, and you’re not locked in to one model provider.

Full visibility

While this sort of effort-based model has become commonplace, Hex provides a unique degree of control to understand and influence your team’s credit consumption.

Users can, of course, always see their own monthly credit usage. Admins can see a snapshot of all paid users’ monthly credit balance, and historical logs to understand usage patterns across the workspace.

But our Context Studio lets you go deeper – down to the individual thread level. It’s a great way to understand what topics users are relying on AI for, and to identify domain areas that could use more context curation. Managers and Admins can see what questions users are asking, which topics come up most, and where Hex Agents express uncertainty or raise warnings - all tied together neatly with proactive context suggestions.

Data teams use that signal to tune context, update data definitions, and test changes before publishing. This drives better data accuracy for users, and better credit efficiency for agents.

As organizations adopt AI more broadly, leaders are looking for better ways to understand the costs, so they can budget effectively and calculate ROI – and we are excited to give them ways to do that.

Our Head of Data, Katie, wrote about tactics to ensure optimal credit efficiency here.

What's next

You may have already been keeping tabs on prompt-level credit consumption in Hex (click the three-dot menu on any completed agent task to see exactly what it cost).

Starting this week, you’ll also be able to see your monthly credit grant balance, as well as historical usage logs, add-on credit options, and monthly spend limit settings for Admins.

Stay tuned for more credit management features rolling out soon, including a model picker, and add-on credit access controls on Team & Enterprise plans.

Questions? Reach out at [email protected] or visit our docs.