AI in Odoo 20: how credits work and how much they cost

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With Odoo 20, released on 24 September 2026, all of the ERP’s artificial intelligence features are paid for with IAP credits, Odoo’s in-app prepaid purchase system. The list price is €1 per credit, and every database starts with 20 free credits. What Odoo does not publish is how many credits each feature uses. This matters for any company considering a move to Odoo 20 and planning to use its AI: chat and agents, AI fields or call transcription.

How AI credits work in Odoo 20

The Odoo 20 release notes sum it up in one line: all AI features require credits, which are purchased through IAP. According to the analysis published by the consultancy Auboros on 6 October, the balance is prepaid and credits do not expire until they are used. They are sold in packs of 10, 100, 500 and 1,000 credits, always at €1 per credit, with no volume discount.

According to that same analysis, the following consume credits:

  • AI chat and agents, whenever a user asks them something.
  • AI fields, which are recalculated by a daily scheduled action that is enabled by default.
  • Agents triggered by scheduled or automated actions.
  • Indexing of the agents’ knowledge sources (documents or web pages) every time they are added or reprocessed.
  • Call transcription and summarisation.

The following do not use Odoo AI credits: an external assistant connected through the Odoo 20 MCP server, which is billed by its own provider, and document digitisation (OCR), which has its own IAP balance.

What is still unknown

The big unknown is consumption. Odoo’s documentation only says that it varies depending on the feature, the complexity of the task and the size of the request. There is no table showing how much it costs to summarise an email or to ask an agent a question. The consultancy much. Consulting notes in its October roundup that even the product managers were unable to explain clearly how credits are calculated, and that partners cannot budget for a cost to their clients that they are unable to estimate.

The second change is one of model. In Odoo 19 you could connect your own ChatGPT or Gemini account and pay the provider directly. Octura Solutions reviewed the code of the pre-release version of Odoo 20 Enterprise and found that those settings were no longer there: all calls go through the Odoo service, and it is Odoo that chooses the language model, which can change without any action on your server. Auboros did not find that option in the released version either and recommends asking Odoo for written confirmation.

These sources should be read with caution. Octura’s analysis was carried out on a pre-launch version, and part of what Auboros and Octura report comes from reading the code, not from official documentation. Odoo may adjust its billing system, and in fact it is already doing so: according to much. Consulting, Fabien Pinckaers, CEO of Odoo, acknowledged a problem with credit consumption that he said had been fixed, announced that they are looking at using cheaper models for simple requests, and admitted that the approach is still not optimal (“still not optimum”).

Practical risks for a company

  • Unapproved spending: AI fields and scheduled agents consume credits on every run, even if nobody reads the result.
  • Silent failures: according to Auboros, when the balance runs out the chat user sees a warning, but scheduled actions simply fail and are only recorded in the log.
  • Data and provider: conversations with agents are stored for up to 30 days after the last message, according to the release notes, and processing takes place on the Odoo service using whichever model Odoo decides.

If you already use Odoo 20, it is advisable to set up the IAP email alert threshold (Settings > Contacts > Odoo IAP > View My Services) with a budget owner, and to measure consumption by comparing the balance before and after a known batch of work.

How we see it at Binovo

At Binovo we implement stable versions and do not chase version trends. Today we implement and maintain Odoo 16. Odoo 20 is on our roadmap, but before bringing it to clients we will stabilise the Community version and check that it has everything the companies we work with need: the Spanish localisation, Verifactu and TicketBAI, and the OCA modules. We have already reviewed what Odoo 20 brings: its AI features are interesting, but they are no reason to upgrade in a hurry, least of all with a cost model that Odoo itself is still adjusting.

Besides, AI in the ERP does not depend on changing versions. With Future AI, the applied AI company of Binovo Group, we already apply AI on Odoo 16 with agents built in agenticHUB and automations with n8n, as we explained when presenting Binovo Apps AI. This approach has three advantages for an SME in Gipuzkoa or elsewhere in the Basque Country:

  • You choose the model and can change it depending on the task, the cost or privacy requirements.
  • The cost is predictable, because you pay the provider for usage you can measure, without depending on a credit balance whose consumption is not published.
  • You control where your data goes, something clients ask about more and more, and which also matters with a view to the EU AI Act.

Our practical recommendation: before considering Odoo 20 for its AI, make a list of two or three specific tasks where AI would save you time (sorting emails, preparing quotes, summarising incidents) and assess whether they can already be solved on your current Odoo. We cover this in more detail in AI for Odoo and in artificial intelligence for businesses, and, if you use automations, in automation with n8n.

If you would like to review what you could automate in your Odoo without changing version, get in touch.

Sources

Transparency: this article was produced with the help of artificial intelligence based on the sources cited, and was reviewed and validated by the Binovo team before publication.

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