A: Hey Donnieyang!

Great question about credits for LLMs and Image Generators – it's a key point of how AgenticFlow offers both value and flexibility.

Here's the breakdown:

Your Monthly AgenticFlow Credits (Included in Your Tier):
What they DO cover:
The fixed cost for every step your workflows and agents execute on our platform (this is for platform orchestration and base compute).
The variable cost (token usage) for our built-in, economical LLMs. These currently include models like GPT-4o-mini, Gemini Flash 2.0, and DeepSeek V3. You can accomplish a lot of text-based AI tasks using just these and your plan credits.
What they typically DON'T cover directly:
Premium/SOTA LLMs: Access to the very latest or most powerful models (e.g., full GPT-4, Claude 3.7 Sonnet/Opus, latest Gemini Pro versions).
Image Generation (and most other specialized AI like video/advanced speech): Services like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney (if API accessible), etc.
Accessing Premium LLMs & Image Generators (Where BYOK & PixelML come in):
BYOK (Bring Your Own Key):
This is for when you want to use an LLM or an AI service (like OpenAI for DALL-E, or a service on Replicate/FAL.ai that generates images) for which you already have your own API key.
You connect your key to AgenticFlow. When a workflow/agent uses this service:
AgenticFlow still uses a small number of your monthly AgenticFlow credits for the fixed step execution cost.
The actual cost of the AI model call (tokens for LLMs, per-image cost for generators) is billed directly by that provider (OpenAI, Replicate, etc.) to your API key. AgenticFlow doesn't add a margin here.
Pixel ML OpenRouter (Uses separate, pay-as-you-go Pixel ML credits):
This is our optional gateway to access many of these same premium LLMs and specialized AI services (including image generators) if you don't want to manage multiple individual API keys or if you want to access models we've optimized for.
You would use separate Pixel ML credits (which you can top up as needed, and they roll over) for these calls. The pricing is designed to be pass-through (the provider's cost) plus a minimal fee for our taxes/transaction handling.
This is not drawing from your monthly AgenticFlow AppSumo plan credits.

In Short:

Yes, your AppSumo tier does come with monthly AgenticFlow credits. These are great for platform usage and our solid built-in economical text LLMs.
For most image generation and for accessing the very latest/most powerful LLMs, you will generally need to either:
BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) from the AI service provider (and pay them directly).
Use the Pixel ML OpenRouter (and pay for that usage with separate Pixel ML credits).
This model allows us to offer the core AgenticFlow platform with generous built-in capabilities at an affordable LTD price, while giving you flexible and cost-effective (direct cost) access to the ever-expanding universe of specialized and premium AI models without us having to bundle those high, fluctuating costs into everyone's base plan.

Hope that makes it clear!
— Sean