How Truffle credits work (and what they actually buy you)
The plan cards say 200, 600, or 1,500 credits. None of those numbers tell you how many candidates you can screen, because that depends entirely on how deep you go. Here's the actual math.
AI summary
- A Truffle credit pool is a screening budget, not a candidate count. A resume scored by AI Match is 1 credit, an assessed candidate is 2, and a completed one-way interview is 5, all drawn from the same monthly pool.
- The same 600-credit plan can cover roughly 600 resume-only screens or as few as 4-5 fully screened roles a month, depending on how many candidates you carry into assessments and interviews.
- Credits only charge on a finished result. A candidate who never starts or never finishes costs nothing, and on Core, Team, and Scale, unused credits roll over for 12 months instead of resetting.
When you land on Truffle’s pricing page, the plan cards show a number: 200 credits, 600 credits, 1,500 credits, 4,000 credits. It’s easy to read that the way you’d read a phone plan’s minutes, as a straight count of how many candidates you can screen. That’s the one place a credit-based model needs explaining, because a credit pool and a candidate count are not the same thing, and the gap between them is usually bigger than people expect.
Here’s the actual mechanic: how many credits a role costs you depends on how deep you screen it, not on how many people applied. A pool of 600 credits could cover 600 candidates in a month, or it could cover 120, or 40, depending entirely on what you do with each one. Once you understand the math, budgeting for Truffle stops being a guess.
What a credit pool actually measures
Truffle runs one shared pool of credits every month, spent across the three ways you can screen a candidate. Each method draws a different amount from the same pool:
- Resume screened by AI Match costs 1 credit.
- Assessed candidate, with all three assessments included, costs 2 credits.
- Completed one-way interview costs 5 credits.
There’s no separate quota for each method and no upsell to unlock one over another. Resume screening, one-way interviews, and assessments ship on every plan, including Starter. The only thing that changes as you move up a plan is the size of the pool.
That single pool is also why the sticker number on a plan card is misleading if you read it as a candidate count. A business that only ever screens resumes could burn through 600 credits on 600 different people. A business that screens resumes, then sends the strongest candidates a one-way interview, then runs assessments on the finalists, will burn through the same 600 credits on a fraction of that number. Same pool, same price, very different candidate volume, because the volume was never the variable that mattered. Depth was.
What actually triggers a charge
A credit is only spent when a screening produces something you can act on: a resume scored by AI Match, a completed assessment, or a submitted one-way interview. If a candidate starts an interview and abandons it, or never opens the assessment link, it costs you nothing. And if you go back and re-read a result you already paid for, that doesn’t charge you a second time. You’re not billed for interest. You’re billed for output.
Why the roles-a-month number is the guide that matters
Truffle’s pricing page doesn’t lead with “here’s your credit pool.” It leads with a plain-language range: Starter covers roughly 1-3 roles a month, Core covers 4-8, Team covers 10-20, Scale covers 25-50. That framing exists because credits, on their own, aren’t the useful unit. Roles are.
The roles-a-month range comes from two rough benchmarks: a thorough funnel, where you run resumes, assessments, and one-way interviews together, averages around 150 credits per role. A lean funnel, where you’re mostly screening resumes with a lighter pass on the rest, runs closer to 75 credits per role. Most businesses land somewhere between those two, and the exact number depends entirely on how many candidates you carry past each stage.
That’s a wide enough range that guessing your plan from the credit number alone is a bad way to budget. Guessing from your actual hiring pattern, roles per month and how many candidates you typically carry to each stage, gets you a real number.
How many credits do you actually need?
That’s the real question underneath the plan cards, whether you’re sizing a plan before you’ve ever run a role through Truffle or double-checking a bill three months in. It isn’t a single number. It’s a formula you can run for your own hiring pattern, plus a few real scenarios to check yourself against.
The formula, if you want to do the math yourself
For any role, add up three numbers: how many resumes you’ll screen, how many candidates you’ll send a one-way interview, and how many finalists you’ll run through an assessment.
Credits per role = (resumes x 1) + (interviews x 5) + (assessments x 2).
Multiply that by how many roles you expect to fill in a month, and you’ve got a working number for your plan. It won’t be exact, hiring volume moves around month to month, but it’ll get you close enough to pick the right pool.
Why “8 credits per candidate” isn’t really the number
Run that formula for one candidate who goes through all three steps and you land on 8 credits: 1 for the resume, 2 for the assessment, 5 for the interview. That arithmetic is right. It’s just not how a role actually plays out.
A funnel narrows at every stage. You screen every resume that comes in, send a one-way interview to a smaller group of the strongest matches, and assess an even smaller group of finalists. If 8 credits were really the going rate per applicant, a 40-resume role would cost 320 credits, more than half of a Core plan’s monthly pool, before you’d talked to anyone. It doesn’t cost that, because you’re only spending the full 8 credits on the handful of people who make it all the way through the funnel you built. Everyone else costs less, because they stopped earlier.
Light: one seasonal role, resumes and an interview
Say you’re filling a front-desk or seasonal spot and don’t need a full assessment. You mostly want to see who can hold a conversation. 30 resumes come in. You screen all 30 (30 credits), then send a one-way interview to your top 9 (9 x 5 = 45 credits). Total: 75 credits, which lines up with the lean-funnel benchmark above. On Starter’s 200-credit pool, that’s room for 2 to 3 roles run this way in a month, right in line with Starter’s “1-3 roles” guide.
Medium: one role, screened the thorough way
Say you’re the GM at a single-location business, and this month you’re filling one coordinator role. You post it, and 40 resumes come in over the week, a normal flood for a role like that with no recruiter to sort it.
- You screen all 40 resumes with AI Match. That’s 40 credits.
- You send a one-way interview to the 15 strongest matches, since a resume alone doesn’t tell you how someone actually communicates. 15 candidates x 5 credits = 75 credits.
- You run an assessment on the 6 finalists, to see how they line up with the role beyond what the interview showed. 6 candidates x 2 credits = 12 credits.
Total for that role: 127 credits. Notice what didn’t happen: you didn’t spend 40 credits per candidate, or even close. You spent 127 credits to go from 40 resumes to a shortlist of 6 people worth a real conversation, with the reasoning attached to each one. On a Core plan (600 credits a month), that’s room for four to five roles run this way, which is exactly the “4-8 roles” range on the plan card once you account for lighter and heavier hiring months.
Run the same role with resumes only, no interview, no assessment at all, and it drops to 40 credits. That’s leaner than even the 75-credit benchmark above, because there’s no interview step to pay for. Neither number is wrong. They’re different screening decisions, and the pool is honest about the cost of each one.
Heavy: a multi-location month
A franchisee running several units posts 15 roles this month across locations. Time is tight, so most of them get the lean treatment: resumes and a one-way interview, no assessment. 15 roles x 75 credits works out to 1,125 credits, comfortably inside Team’s 1,500-credit pool, with a few hundred credits left over to run 2 or 3 of those roles the thorough way instead, for the positions that need a closer look.
Sizing a full year, not just a month
If you’re picturing a year instead of a month, the math is the same, just multiplied by 12. Team’s 1,500-credit monthly pool, for example, adds up to 18,000 credits across a year. On annual billing, that whole year’s pool is available from day one instead of arriving a twelfth at a time, so a slow first quarter and a busy fourth quarter both draw from the same total instead of resetting every month.
What happens when you guess wrong
Most people who ask about credits are really asking a different question: what happens when I’m wrong about my volume. That’s a fair worry, and the plan mechanics answer it directly.
If you run under your pool
On Core, Team, and Scale, credits you don’t use roll over for 12 months, up to 3 times your plan’s monthly pool, as long as you stay subscribed. A slow month doesn’t disappear. If you go annual, your whole year of credits is available up front, so a hiring freeze in March doesn’t cost you anything you can’t use in June. Starter is the exception: it’s a flat monthly pool with no roll-over, which is part of why it’s priced for occasional, not constant, hiring.
If you run over your pool
You’re never cut off mid-hire. On Core and up, extra screening past your pool is billed at a flat $0.25 per credit, so a busier-than-usual month becomes a slightly bigger bill, not a blocked candidate. Starter is a hard cap with no overage, which keeps the price predictable if you’re hiring rarely, but means you’d want to move up a plan before a spike, not after one.
The practical upshot: don’t try to guess your exact number and land on a plan by trial and error. The live calculator on the pricing page has three sliders, one for resume screens, one for assessments, one for interviews, and it tallies your monthly credit need and flags which plan is actually cheapest to run at that volume, roll-over and overage included. That’s a more honest number than any of the estimates in this post, because it’s running your real mix instead of an example one.
The plans, side by side
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Credits/mo | Roughly | Roll-over |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $49 | monthly only | 200 | 1-3 roles/mo | None |
| Core | $119 | $99 | 600 | 4-8 roles/mo | Up to 3x pool, 12 mo |
| Team | $239 | $199 | 1,500 | 10-20 roles/mo | Up to 3x pool, 12 mo |
| Scale | $599 | $499 | 4,000 | 25-50 roles/mo | Up to 3x pool, 12 mo |
| Custom | Book a call | n/a | Custom volume | 50+ roles/mo | n/a |
Every plan, including Starter, includes unlimited positions, unlimited team members, AI Match scores and reasoning, full interview transcripts, Candidate Shorts, and custom branding on every Position Link. You’re not paying more per seat to add a teammate, and you’re not paying extra to unlock a screening method you already have. The only lever is the size of the pool.
Try it before you commit to a number
If you’re not sure which plan fits, you don’t have to guess or book a call to find out. Truffle’s free trial runs 7 days with 30 credits, no credit card required. That’s roughly enough to run one small role the thorough way, resumes, a one-way interview, and an assessment on your finalists, and see what your own hiring pattern actually costs before you commit to a plan.
Resume screening, one-way interviews, and talent assessments share one meter because they’re three depths of the same read on a candidate. Pricing it that way means the pool charges you for how much you actually learned about someone, not for the fact that they applied.
Most recruiting software pricing hides the real cost behind seats, per-job fees, or a sales call. Truffle’s version of that same problem is a credit pool that’s genuinely usage-based, and now you know exactly what it’s measuring.
Frequently asked questions about Truffle’s credit pricing
How many credits do I need for one role?
It depends on how many resumes you screen and how many candidates you carry into interviews and assessments. A rough formula: (resumes x 1) + (one-way interviews x 5) + (assessments x 2). A lean role (resumes plus a light interview pass) runs around 75 credits. A thorough role (resumes, interviews, and assessments together) runs closer to 150.
How many credits does a resume screen cost?
One credit per resume scored by AI Match, regardless of plan. That includes the match score, the reasoning behind it, and where the candidate lines up against the criteria you set for the role.
Do credits expire at the end of the month?
Not on Core, Team, or Scale. Unused credits roll over for 12 months while you stay subscribed, capped at 3 times your plan’s monthly pool. Starter is a flat monthly pool with no roll-over, since it’s built for occasional hiring rather than a constant treadmill of roles.
What happens if I go over my credit pool?
On Core and up, extra screening bills at a flat $0.25 per credit, so you’re never blocked from screening a candidate mid-hire. Starter has a hard cap with no overage option, so a busy week on that plan means waiting until next month or moving up a plan.
Can I switch plans if my hiring volume changes?
Yes. You can move up or down as your hiring pattern changes, and the calculator on the pricing page will show you which plan is cheapest for your actual usage, including overage costs, rather than just the smallest pool that technically covers you.
Does every plan include the same features?
Yes. Resume screening, one-way interviews, and assessments are included on every plan, along with unlimited positions, unlimited team members, and custom branding. Plans differ only in the size of the monthly credit pool, never in what you’re able to do with it.
