The Plan Has a Price. What Did Last Month Actually Cost?
The price on the pricing page is not the bill
Every piece of software you pay for has two prices. There is the one on the pricing page, and there is the one that turns up on your card. For a flat subscription they are the same number. For anything metered they drift apart, and most hosts find out by how much only when a busy month produces a bigger invoice than they expected.
Airflow is metered. Each plan comes with a monthly allowance of automated tasks, and automated work uses them: processing a booking email, drafting an invoice into your accounts, a chat with the Account Manager agent. That is a fairer model than paying per property whether you use it or not (we explained why here; current plans and prices are on the pricing page). But a fair model still needs a straight answer to a plain question: what did the account cost to run last month, and what will it cost in August?
We published every channel’s real cost of sale in the same table as our own. This post does the same for the subscription.
One month, itemised
This is one month on an Airflow demo account: three properties on the Growth plan, with its monthly allowance of automated tasks (current allowances).
A few things stand out.
A booking can be two automated tasks, not one. When a booking email arrives, processing it is one task. Drafting its invoice into Xero is another. That is why “Invoices drafted” (28) is larger than “Booking emails processed” (22): the six direct bookings were drafted too. If you do not connect accounting, the second task never happens.
The background work is free. Calendar sync on Airflow’s own schedule costs nothing, and neither does the scheduled monthly update of your profit and loss from Xero. For syncs and refreshes the rule is simple: on Airflow’s schedule it is free, and on demand it costs. So the accounts panel’s Update now · 2 credits button is exactly that, and it asks before it takes them: “This uses 2 credits. The scheduled monthly update is free.”
The Help Agent is free, and the Account Manager is not. Asking how something works costs nothing. Asking the Account Manager agent to do something for you is two tasks per conversation, however many messages it takes (and free while you are onboarding).
| What used it | Count | Tasks each | Tasks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Invoices drafted to Xero | 28 | 1 | 28 |
| Booking emails processed | 22 | 1 | 22 |
| Reviews received | 9 | 1 | 9 |
| Account Manager chats | 4 | 2 | 8 |
| Direct bookings | 6 | 1 | 6 |
| Accounting refresh, on demand | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| Calendar sync, Help Agent, monthly accounting update | — | free | 0 |
| Total | 75, inside the allowance |
Example figures from a demo account, not a real customer.
What the month actually cost
Automated tasks are an allowance, not money. The only things that cost money are the plan itself, any add-ons you choose, and extra tasks, which you get either by turning on overages or by buying them. Nothing else moves money, and that includes a free trial: the tasks you use during the trial come out of the plan’s allowance, and your card is not charged until the trial ends.
So the demo account’s month cost exactly what the plan costs. Here is the same account across three months of a year:
| Month | Tasks used | Plan (Growth) | Extra tasks | Paid that month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| February (quiet) | 41 | plan price | — | the plan price |
| The month above | 75 | plan price | — | the plan price |
| August (peak) | 118 | plan price | one 20-task top-up | the plan price + one top-up |
Example figures from a demo account. For the plan price and the per-task rate, see the pricing page.
With overages on, the portal buys a top-up automatically when you reach one task remaining, in packs of 20, 50 or 100 at your plan’s per-task rate (on the pricing page). Purchased tasks never expire, so what August’s top-up did not use is still there in September. With overages off, you get a low-allowance banner in the portal and an email when you are down to the last fifth of the allowance, and once it is gone the portal says plainly: “New booking emails, agent chats, accounting drafts and reviews pause until your allowance resets on the 1st, or you add actions now.” Decide which of those you want before August, not during it.
Is this the right plan?
Once you can see a year of months, the plan question stops being a guess.
On Growth, each task beyond the allowance is bought at the plan’s per-task rate, 20 at a time. Portfolio costs more a month and includes a much bigger allowance. For the demo account, the crossover is the point where a year of top-ups costs more than the gap between the two plan prices, averaged over the year, because unused top-ups carry forward. Below that, Growth plus the odd August top-up is cheaper. Routinely above it, Portfolio wins, and it includes more listings too (current plans).
Most hosts never do this arithmetic, because a subscription gives them nothing to do it with. It is the reason the numbers are shown.
Where you read your own number
There are two places, and they answer different questions.
Stats → Overview → Credit consumption is the snapshot. It shows Available now (everything you can spend), Monthly plan (what is left of this month’s allowance), and Reward & bonus (non-expiring tasks from referrals, promotions and purchases), then a bar for this month’s usage and a Credit breakdown underneath. If you run more than one organisation and view them all together, a Per-organisation list shows each one’s usage separately under the combined figures.
Activity Log → User Actions is the ledger. Every action is a line: what happened, when, and what it cost, with Total actions consumed at the foot of whatever you have filtered. The figure above is that list for one month, grouped by type.
One naming quirk to know about: the Stats panel and a few buttons still say credits, and the Activity Log says actions, where the pricing page says automated tasks. They are the same thing.
What this report needs. Nothing to connect. Automated tasks are logged as they are used, so the ledger starts on your first day. The Stats panel shows the current month; for earlier months, the User Actions tab is the record. What it cannot show you is an action Airflow never performed: a channel it cannot see costs nothing and is missing from your other reports instead.
No surprises by design
The part we care about most is not the pricing but the moment before you spend. The on-demand accounts refresh names its price on the button and asks first. Batches sent to your accounts are quoted before they run, and a batch you cannot afford is refused whole, not half-done (how that works). An action taken without a clear yes is the kind of surprise that makes people distrust metered pricing, and we would rather not earn that distrust.
See it on your own numbers
Everything above is one demo account. The version that matters is yours, and it takes about twenty minutes to get there:
- Start your trial: free for the trial period. Your card is taken at signup and not charged until the trial ends; cancel before then and you pay nothing.
- Import your history. Paste your Airbnb or Booking.com iCal link, or upload a CSV export. Importing bookings into Airflow uses no automated tasks.
- Connect your accounting, if you keep books in Xero. Sending history across is quoted before it runs, so you will know the cost in tasks before you agree to it.
- Open Stats. Overview for the Credit consumption panel, then Activity Log → User Actions for the line-by-line.
Related: Automated Tasks, Not Per-Property Fees, Know What the Import Will Cost Before It Runs, and Airbnb Says 15%. Your Books Say 18.4%.