It is an API that is managed, secured and monitored in Frends, but the message is routed to third-party API or microservice, thus the business logic or functionality is executed elsewhere outside Frends.

Cloud deployment means that instead of deploying the integration runtimes or Frends Agents into infrastructure you manage, you will purchase them as a service from Frends where they will be hosted in Frends managed Azure infrastructure. Additionally for Cloud deployments each integration runtime or Agent will have a limitation of 250 simple integration executions per second.

An Execution is one complete run of a process or API call. Sub-processes within a main process don't count as separate executions. Each pass-through API call is counted as one execution. 

Example: If your order sync process runs every 5 minutes, that's 288 executions per day (12 per hour × 24 hours). 

• Cloud Agents: Hosted and managed by Frends 
• Self-Service Agents: Deployed in your own infrastructure 
• HA Agent = Cloud or Self-Service Agent in high-availability (HA) and load-balancing mode. Available in Enterprise Tier. 

They mean Environments built within Frends to enable seamless deployments throughout the the pipeline from Development to Production. For fully customized pipelines you can define as many environments as you'd like.

Environment is a part of the pipeline and contains integration runtimes or Frends Agents which actually execute the integrations deployed to said Environment. Note that for Hybrid Deployments you can install as many Agents within a single Environment on your own infrastructure as you'd like to enable Hybrid Scenarios.

Environment is a part of the pipeline and contains integration runtimes or Frends Agents which actually execute the integrations deployed to said Environment. Note that for Hybrid Deployments you can install as many Agents within a single Environment on your own infrastructure as you'd like to enable Hybrid Scenarios.

High-Availability support is the ability to deploy multiple integration runtimes to share the same load and failover in-case of a disaster scenario. Note High-Availability support for the Frends Agents are only available on the Enterprise tier.

Frends utilizes Azure Resources to provide the service and those services are configured to be isolated logically from one-another. With fully dedicated premium resources utilized Azure Resources are upgraded to a premium version in Azure and are fully dedicated for each Customer.

Frends Credits are tokens consumed when using Frends-hosted AI models for intelligent automation tasks. 

Conversion: 1 Frends Credit ≈ 3000-6000 AI tokens (input, output and caching combined) depending on the chosen AI model. E.g. GPT 4o consumes less tokens than GPT5. 

How are Credits consumed? 

Credits can be consumed partially based on the complexity of the AI task: 

• Simple email categorization: ~0.12 credits 

• Complex document analysis: ~2-5 credits 

• Large-scale text processing: ~10+ credits 

Credit consumption is calculated at the end of the process execution, so e.g. small amounts of AI tokens consumed inside a Frends loop are not calculated Frends Credits until the process end. This prevents the problem rounding up might make small loops expensive. 

One Frends Credit cost 0,01€ and the consumption based invoicing occurs per 1000 Frends Credits (10€ per 1000 credits).  

Credit Management 

• See the credit consumption of single execution ofduring the development of a Frends Process 

• Monitor consumption via the admin portal 

• Set monthly consumption limits to control costs 

• Option to use your own AI models instead of Frends-hosted ones 

Example: If you process 1000 support emails daily using AI categorization (0.12 credits each), you'd consume approximately 3,600 credits per month. 

The main deciding factor to choose a correct Frends tier is decided by the need of hybrid deployments compared to pure cloud or ground deployments as well as the maximum number of allowed API and Integration executions per month. We have provided samples of typical customer environments for you to review and choose your tier correctly. Remember you can always start small and expand later!

With the normal Frends Tiers you are not allowed to re-sell any part of the Service or Solutions and you should instead look at Frends ISV Partner tier.