Recently, I’ve been running Manus and Creao at the same time to do some Agent tasks, and I found a problem that many people haven’t seriously compared: the two companies’ credit consumption mechanisms differ so much that it’s honestly absurd.

On the surface, both start at $20/month.
But how much work you can do with $20 entirely depends on how it’s billed.
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Manus Standard: $20/month, 4,000 credits
Sounds like plenty.
But its billing is charged per micro-operation.
Someone in the community broke it down: viewing a webpage costs 10 credits, editing a file costs 10 credits, and it deducts you at every step.
For a task involving multi-source research, a single run can eat up 500-900 credits.
On Reddit, someone recorded that after running a task for 30 minutes, 1,000 credits were gone—and the task wasn’t even finished.
Let’s do the math: 4,000 ÷ 500 = at most 8 complex tasks per month.
If your tasks are heavier (research, multi-webpage crawling), you might hit the bottom after 4-5.
What’s even more troublesome is there’s no real-time usage reminder.
You don’t know how many credits the Agent burns while it’s executing—only when you run out of credits.
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Creao Pro: $20/month, 200 credits
Pro Plus: $50/month, 600 credits.
At first glance, the numbers look much smaller.
But the credit granularity is completely different between the two.
Creao’s billing granularity is coarser.
It doesn’t deduct for every micro-operation.
If an Agent browses 10 webpages, you won’t be charged 10 extra times.
The actual cost of a single complex task is relatively predictable.
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So what does this difference determine?
It determines whether you can estimate roughly how much a task will cost before you do it on Creao.
With Manus, the cost for the same task is unknown.
It depends on how many webpages the Agent decides to browse, how many files it edits, and how many times it calls APIs.
You hand control to the Agent, but you also hand the bill to it.
My take: having more credits doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better value—the key is billing granularity and transparency.
Manus’s problem isn’t that it’s expensive; it’s that it’s unpredictable.
You can’t estimate the cost before starting a task.
Creao’s issue is that Pro plan credits are on the low side: $20 only gets you 200, and heavy users will burn through them quickly.
If your overall task volume isn’t large but each task is relatively complex (multi-source research, long workflow automation), Manus may end up costing much more than it looks.
If you need to run Agents frequently and want to control your budget, Creao’s pricing structure is easier to account for.
Neither side has an absolute winner—it depends on your usage scenario.
The above is only based on personal usage observations and does not constitute any advice. DYOR.