Zendesk stopped charging credits for its own actions

If you build automation in Zendesk, the September release notes changed what your action flows cost. The headline is that Zendesk stopped billing you for using Zendesk.

What changed

Zendesk now describes unlimited automation of Zendesk operations, including all standard Zendesk actions and Zendesk-built external actions, without affecting credit usage. Action credits apply to third-party and custom actions.

In plain terms: moving a ticket, updating a field, firing a Zendesk-built connector, none of that draws down your allowance any more. Calling your own API, or a third-party system through a custom action, still does.

The part that is not tidy

The release note and the credit-monitoring article do not read the same way.

The monitoring article says credits are consumed primarily by external actions and custom actions, then lists specific exemptions: all action flow triggers, all flow control and utility steps such as branch and custom code, all actions within flows started by the Run on demand trigger, and all Zendesk actions related to assets, along with Jamf Pro and Microsoft Intune actions. It also notes that testing a flow, and actions taken by Copilot or AI agents, do not consume credits.

That is a narrower statement than the release note's. One document describes a category, the other describes a list. We are not going to tell you which one governs your invoice, because Zendesk has not said.

What to do instead of guessing

Open Admin Center, then Account, then Usage, then Summary. That page shows credits used and remaining for the month. It is the only number that reflects your account rather than a documentation sentence.

Compare it against the month before the change. If your flows are mostly native Zendesk steps, the line should have dropped noticeably. If it has not, your flows are leaning on custom or third-party actions more than you thought, and that is worth knowing on its own.

The allowances, for context

• Team and Growth: 40,000 action credits a month.
• Professional: 100,000.
• Enterprise: 225,000.
• Enterprise Plus: 400,000.

Most teams we open are nowhere near these ceilings. The teams that are tend to have one flow calling an external system on every ticket, which is a design question rather than a plan question.

What this changes about how you build

It removes a reason to be clever. Teams have been batching Zendesk operations to conserve credits, or pushing logic into a single custom action because a chain of native steps felt expensive. That trade-off is gone for the native half.

Build the flow that reads clearly. Keep custom and third-party calls to the points where they earn their place, which was good practice before the pricing changed.

Verified against

• Zendesk help, What's new in Zendesk: September 2026, native Zendesk actions and credit usage.
• Zendesk help, Monitoring the usage of action credits and action flow activity, including the exemption list and the per-plan allowances.

Checked against Zendesk's own documentation on September 13, 2026. The two documents were still worded differently on that date.