Subagent Fan-Out is available on every agent. There’s nothing to enable — the agent decides on its own when a given job is a good fit for fanning out.
When It Helps
Fan-out shines when the pieces of work are independent — each piece doesn’t need to know what the others are doing.- One output per item — a tailored note per company, a check per device, a summary per ticket cluster.
- Multiple angles on the same question — investigate a topic from several sides at once and aggregate the findings.
- Bulk audits — sweep many systems for the same condition without waiting for each one in turn.
When It Doesn’t Fit
If you want to nudge the agent toward (or away from) fanning out on a particular workflow, say so in the agent’s custom instructions — e.g. “when generating per-company summaries, do them in parallel.”
Safety
Billing
Each subagent counts as its own agent execution. The cost of a fan-out run is the parent agent’s normal cost plus one execution per subagent — same rules you already know from Billing & Credits. How that breaks down depends on how the parent agent is set up:
Worked example. A Triggered agent at the Standard tier dispatches 10 subagents. Cost = 2 (parent) + 10 × 2 (subagents) = 22 credits.
A Scheduled agent makes 1 Basic tool call, then dispatches 3 subagents, each of which makes 2 Basic + 1 Standard call. Cost = 1 + 3 × (2 + 2) = 13 credits.
Failed or timed-out subagents are still billed — they consumed work even if they didn’t return a useful result. The agent’s own self-assessment of execution quality (visible on the execution log) is separate from the credit charge.