Rovo Dev insanely high credit usage for "Code review in Bitbucket"

[Chris Mingay]

We enabled Rovo Dev Standard yesterday having been generally quite impressed by the PR review functionality. I added a relatively generic review-agent.md file to my repo with 20 uncomplicated rules (e.g. flag the use of magic strings, request unit tests for modified and added code). I started today having used 0 of my 2000 credits. 

I added a simple PR that added three shell Azure Function App projects to a dotnet solution.

Rovo had a look at the PR and made a few suggestions and in doing so appeared to use 965 of my 2000 credits with 760 being marked as  "Code review in Bitbucket", I'm not sure where the other 205 went??

Either I'm doing something amazingly wrong or that's not value for money at all. Any input would be appreciated and I'd love to hear similar usage stats from other users as well.

[Ryan Jiang]

Hi Chris, thanks for raising this.

I am the product manager looking after the code review experience. (Sachin is on the point for things contributing to higher credit usage.)

And I'd love to have a quick chat with you to try understand your usage pattern, book a meeting here if you are interested: https://calendly.com/ryan-jiang-atlassian/rovodev-feedback-session-us-apac-clone

Meanwhile, it'd be great if you could send the following to my email rjiang2@atlassian.com (for privacy reasons) so that I can help take a closer look:

1. URL to the PR you raised;

2. Screenshot of the usage screen to help understand where that 205 credit went;

Best,

Ryan Jiang

[Rustem Shiriiazdanov _Actonic_]

@Paul Pasler _Seibert_ you have been working with ROVO quite some time recently, what do you think about the topic?

[Sachin Jagtap _PM_]

Yeah, you’re not crazy that credit usage can spike fast with Rovo Dev PR reviews, especially on repos with multiple files, generated code, or large diffs.

A few things that usually drive the credit burn up:

• Number of files + total diff size (even if the change feels “simple”)
• Repeated review runs (every time you re-run the review or push commits, it can consume credits again)
• Multi-project PRs (like adding 3 function apps + solution changes = lots of new files to scan)
• Agent rules causing deeper analysis (more rules = more checks, more reasoning, more tokens/credits)

The “missing” credits could be from background usage like indexing/context building, or other Rovo actions happening in the same window — the reporting isn’t always super transparent yet.

What helped us reduce it:

• Keep PRs smaller where possible
• Don’t auto-run review on every update (manual trigger instead)
• Limit the review scope to key folders (if supported)
• Keep the review-agent rules focused (avoid too many “always check everything” type rules)

Honestly, I agree: ~760 credits for one PR review feels heavy, and it’s worth raising with Atlassian because the value drops quickly if you’re reviewing multiple PRs per day.