How to get rid of Base44's integration credits

Your app finally has users. People actually use the thing you built, whether that's your clients, your team or your members. Then one morning the AI stops answering, or photos won't upload, or the emails don't go out, and your users get an error that explains nothing. Or Base44 emailed you first: you've used 90% of your integration credits, and any app that relies on them will stop working until the credits reset or you upgrade.

That's your integration credits running out. Every email your app sends, every file a user uploads, every AI answer, every push notification, every hundred backend function calls and every ten workflow steps takes a credit out of one monthly pool that all your apps share. You can't see what an action will cost before it runs. When the pool hits zero, every feature that uses it stops, for every user, until the pool resets. And the more people use your app, the faster it empties. So Base44 blocks your app right when it starts getting users.

I've watched this happen to a lot of owners, usually the same week their app took off. On Base44 it ends one of two ways: you upgrade, or your users wait.

Message credits build the app. Integration credits run it

A Base44 plan comes with two kinds of credits. Message credits are what you spend building, in the AI chat. Integration credits are what your app spends running, every time it does anything through Base44's services. Both come as a monthly allowance that grows with the plan: Builder at $50 a month gives you 10,000 integration credits, Pro at $100 gives you 20,000, Elite at $200 gives you 50,000, and each Elite step above that is another $100 for another 25,000.

On new workspaces it's one pool now. Base44 has started merging the two kinds of credits, so an afternoon of building uses up credits your users need, and the app you spent months on can stop because you fixed a bug on the 20th. One Pro owner used 500 credits in three days of building, and his live app stopped working properly. The next tier would have cost him $1,000 more for 1,200 credits. And on those workspaces, Base44 tells you that reading and writing your app's own data uses “a small number of credits, like other app activity.” Even opening a record costs you something now.

Nothing you can do on Base44 gets rid of the credits

When the pool runs out, or you can see it's about to, people usually try one of seven things on Base44:

1. Waiting for the reset. The pool comes back on your billing date, and until then your users get errors. Next month it runs out again, a little earlier, because you have more users than last month.
2. Rationing your users. You turn off the AI for free accounts, cap uploads and close signups. “The app is basically personal use only now because of integration credits,” is how one owner put it. You built the app so people would use it, and now you're stopping them.
3. Switching to the cheapest AI model. Base44's “Automatic” model costs one credit a call where the better models cost three to thirty-four, so people make their app dumber to get through the month. The emails, the uploads and the function calls cost exactly what they cost before.
4. Buying a top-up. You can't. Base44 sold credit top-ups for a few months this year, one owner had spent well over €300 on them, and then Base44 took them away. Its own top-ups page now says “Credit top-ups are no longer available.” The only thing left to buy is the next plan.
5. Upgrading. Builder to Pro to Elite to Elite 2, each step $50 to $100 more a month, and each one comes stuffed with thousands of building credits you don't need, because the app is already built. “That's paying for a resource I don't consume to get the one I do,” one owner wrote on Base44's feedback board. Another, already on Elite 4: “Even if I jump to Elite 9, it's still not enough.” Upgrading doesn't remove the limit. It moves it up a little, and the more users you get, the sooner you hit it again.
6. Using your own OpenAI key on Base44. It's what owners ask for most, and Base44 has it marked as shipped. But there's nowhere to put your key into the AI your app already uses. Base44's built-in AI and its agents run on “Base44's own managed provider setup, so you do not handle API keys,” as its docs put it, and they stay on your credits whatever key you have. Your key only works in a backend function that calls the AI company itself, on Builder or higher. So every AI feature in your app has to be rewritten into one of those, and everything Base44's AI did for you becomes yours to handle: the call, the key, reading the answer. Base44 still charges a credit for every hundred times the function runs. You do all of that, and your app still runs on Base44's credits.

7. Moving to another builder. That means building the app again from scratch, and then you're on that builder's credits instead.

   Why every other builder means rebuilding your app, and what to do instead

Six of these leave the app on Base44, and the seventh throws away the app you have. As long as your app runs on Base44, every person who uses it spends your credits. The credits only go away when the app leaves.

Base44 is a middleman, and the credits are how it makes money

The AI in your app isn't Base44's, and neither is the email. When your app answers a question, Base44 passes it to Google, OpenAI or Anthropic, the way any developer would. Your app's emails go out through an email company, and the files your users upload sit in storage Base44 rents. Those companies charge almost nothing: a fraction of a cent for an everyday AI call, a few hundredths of a cent for an email, less than a thousandth of a cent for an upload. Base44 is the middleman. It sits between your app and every one of them, counts every call in credits, and charges you for the credits at your plan's rate. A credit is a Base44 pricing invention, not a real cost: its own unit, priced however Base44 decides.

And this year Base44 kept putting more of what your app does on credits. In June, backend function calls didn't use any. Now every hundred of them costs a credit. Push notifications cost credits now. On new workspaces, so does reading your own data. And top-ups were taken away. Over the same months, Base44's gross margin went from about zero at the start of the year to about 60% in the second half, and the price of a credit didn't move.

So the credits aren't there to cover Base44's costs. They're how Base44 makes its money, and the money is in the apps that have users. Base44 says as much on its own pricing page: paid plans “scale by credits”, and Elite is “for people running their main product or business on Base44.” That's why your users spend your credits, and why the only way to get more is a bigger plan. Buying just the integration credits you need has 440 votes on Base44's feedback board, and you still can't.

What an email, an upload and an AI call actually cost

On Builder and Pro, one credit costs you half a cent. On Starter it's a full cent, and on Elite a little under half a cent. Here is what the same things cost when your app buys them directly, on an account of your own:

• An email. One credit on Base44, two if it comes from your own domain. Bought directly, an email service sends the first 3,000 a month for free, and after that each email costs between one and four hundredths of a cent. Base44 charges 10 to 100 times that.
• A file upload. One credit on Base44. Bought directly, the first 10 GB of storage and the first million uploads a month are free, and after that an upload costs about half a thousandth of a cent. Base44 charges about 1,000 times that.
• An everyday AI call. One credit on Base44 for its “Automatic” model, which is a small Google model. Bought directly, the same call on the same model costs about seven hundredths of a cent. Base44 charges 6 to 14 times that.
• A call to a stronger model, like Claude Sonnet. Ten to thirty-four credits on Base44, depending on how long the prompt is, so 5 to 17 cents on Builder. Bought directly, the same call costs half a cent to two cents. Base44 charges 8 to 17 times that.
• A function call, a workflow step, a push notification, reading or writing a record. A credit, or a fraction of one, on Base44. Bought directly, nothing per use. They run on your own server, and a server costs the same every month however many people used your app.

Say 500 people use your app in a month, and each of them gets 4 emails, uploads 3 files, asks the AI 20 questions and sets off 200 function calls. On Base44 that's 14,500 credits. That's past Builder's 10,000, so you're on Pro at $100 a month, and at around 700 users you've outgrown Pro too. The same month bought directly: the 2,000 emails are inside the free tier, the uploads and the function calls cost nothing, and the AI comes to about $7. Double the users and the AI is about $14. That's the only part of the bill that grows with your users.

How to move your app onto normal providers without rebuilding it

A normal app doesn't have this problem, because there's no middleman. Its own backend calls the AI company directly on the owner's key, sends emails through the owner's own email account, and keeps files in the owner's own storage. The owner pays those companies' prices, the ones above, plus a flat hosting bill that doesn't grow with every user. That's how every app that isn't built on a vibecoding platform already runs.

A Base44 app doesn't run like that, because Base44 doesn't let it. Its export gives you the screens, and nothing that spends credits happens in the screens. It all happens in Base44's backend: the server code that signs your users in, stores every record, sends every email, makes every AI call and runs every function. Base44 runs that code for every app on the platform and doesn't hand it over. So before an app can move as it is, that whole backend has to be written again somewhere else.

I did that for my own app. I was paying Base44 $50 a month for an app that barely had any traffic, and I kept running into things in it I wasn't allowed to change. So I wrote all of it again myself: the sign-in, the database, the functions, the files, the emails and the AI calls. It took months before my app ran without Base44 at all. Once it did, I turned the whole move into EscapeBase44, so it works for any Base44 app.

You sign in with Base44, pick the app and the providers, and the move runs by itself. The app moves as it is: every screen, every record, every uploaded file, the functions and the workflows, and your users with the passwords they already have. Base44's backend comes with it, as code in a GitHub repository of your own, so the server your app runs on is yours and nothing in it counts credits. For the people using your app, it's the same app. Your Base44 app isn't touched during the move, so your users keep using it until the new one is running, and then you cancel your Base44 plan.

And you keep building. The code is yours, the backend included, so you can keep working on it in an AI chat like the one you had on Base44, paying only for what you use, with no monthly allowance. Or open it in an AI coding tool like Claude Code or Cursor, or hand it to a developer.

Running the app costs what the providers charge, and nothing else. The AI runs on your own key, through OpenRouter (one key that works with every model) or directly with OpenAI if you'd rather. You pay them per call, fractions of a cent: most apps that moved spend cents a month on AI, and the busiest spend a few dollars. Emails go out from your own domain through your own email account, and the first 3,000 a month are free. Hosting is a free plan for a small app or a $7 to $24 server for a busy one, and the bill is the same whether ten people used the app this month or a thousand. And if what you wanted all along was to bring your own AI key, after the move that's simply how your app runs.

What people paid Base44, and what running the app costs them now

These owners made that move this year. On Base44 they paid for one plan that covers building and running together, because that's how Base44 sells it. What they pay now is only what it costs to run the app, on accounts of their own.

• Dipak is an emergency-medicine doctor in the UK. His app is a training tool for junior doctors, and every image they upload costs a credit. In under four weeks he went from Starter to Builder to Pro to Elite: $20, $50, $100, then $200 a month. Now the app costs him $0 a month to run, his Base44 plan is cancelled, and he's bringing on more hospitals.
• Ludwig built a tool where a 30-person marketing team plans and approves its content, with uploads, emails, AI and agents. On Base44 he paid $50 a month for Builder, plus four top-ups in six weeks. Now it runs on one $24 server, and the AI his whole team used in two months came to a cent and a half.
• Jen built a tarot journal app. On Base44 she paid $100 a month for Pro, then $50 for Builder. Now her hosting is free and her AI cost 43 cents this month.
• Jason has two apps, one that manages a fleet of network devices and one that monitors cameras at his customers' locations. For months he bounced between Elite, Pro and Builder trying to find a plan that fit. Both now run on free hosting, and his AI bill this month is 36 cents.
• Boris has two bigger apps and was paying $100 a month for Pro. They need real servers, so he now pays about $53 a month for both, AI included.

But the money is the small part. What really changes is that there's no pool. Nothing counts down when people use your app, nothing stops halfway through the month, and you never again have to work out how many users you can afford, or switch to a worse AI model so the credits last. Someone signs up, uploads ten photos and asks the AI twenty questions, and nothing happens except your app doing its job.

Base44 integration credits FAQ

• What uses integration credits on Base44?

  Everything your app does through Base44's services while people use it, and every app in your workspace draws from the same monthly pool. An email, a file upload, a push notification and an everyday AI call cost one credit each, and an email from your own domain costs two. Better AI models cost three to thirty-four credits a call, an agent message three or more, and every ten workflow steps or hundred backend function calls cost one.

• What happens when integration credits run out?

  Every feature that uses them stops until the pool resets on your billing date, and your users get a generic error that doesn't mention credits. The only way to get them back sooner is a bigger plan.

• Can I buy more integration credits?

  No. Base44 sold credit top-ups for a few months in 2026 and then took them away, and its own top-ups page now says they're no longer available. The only way to get more is the next plan, which comes with thousands of building credits whether you need them or not.

• Do integration credits roll over?

  No. Whatever you don't use expires at the monthly reset. The request to let them roll over has over 1,800 votes on Base44's feedback board, and it hasn't happened.

• What's the difference between message credits and integration credits?

  Message credits are spent when you build, in the AI chat. Integration credits are spent when your app runs: every email, upload, AI call, workflow and function call. On new workspaces Base44 has merged them into one pool, so building spends the same credits your users need.

• Can I use my own OpenAI key on Base44?

  Not in the AI your app already uses. Base44's built-in AI and its agents run only on Base44's credits. Your own key works only in a backend function that calls the AI company itself, on Builder or higher, so every AI feature has to be rewritten into one, and Base44 charges a credit for every hundred times that function runs. After the move, your own key is simply how your app runs, with nothing between it and the AI provider.

• How many users can my Base44 app have before the credits run out?

  As many as your monthly credit pool pays for, and no more. On Builder that's 10,000 credits, so an app whose users each cost twenty credits a month stops at about 500 active users. Off Base44 there's no pool, so there's no number.

• Is Base44 unlimited on any plan?

  No. Every plan has a monthly credit pool, and even Elite 11, at $1,200 a month, stops at 300,000 credits. Upgrading raises the limit. It never removes it.

• What will AI cost me after I move my app off Base44?

  The AI provider's own price, on your own key: fractions of a cent per call. Apps moved off Base44 with EscapeBase44 spend between nothing and a few dollars a month on AI, and most of them spend cents.

• Do I pay EscapeBase44 per AI call or per user after the move?

  No. You pay for the move once. After that you pay the AI provider for the calls your app makes and your hosting a flat monthly amount, and nothing per call or per user to EscapeBase44.