I Audited 30 Days of My Manus AI Logs — Here's Where Every Credit Actually Went

Last month I did something most Manus users probably should but never do: I exported my complete usage logs and categorized every single task by type, model used, credit cost, and whether the output actually needed that level of compute. The results were... uncomfortable. The Setup I tracked 217 tasks over 30 consecutive days of daily Manus usage. For each task, I logged: Task category (code, research, writing, data, automation) Credits consumed Which model tier was actually used (Standard vs Max) Whether the task needed that tier (judged by output quality) Time to completion I wasn't trying to prove anything. I genuinely wanted to understand where my $39/month was going. The Raw Numbers Metric Value Total tasks 217 Total credits consumed 14,847 Average credits per task 68.4 Median credits per task 42 Most expensive single task 891 credits Cheapest useful task 3 credits That gap between average (68.4) and median (42) already tells a story — a small number of expensive tasks are draggin