Credit-based pricing sells a prepaid allowance of credits that customers spend on different actions, each with a published credit cost. A simple action might cost one credit and a complex one hundreds. Most AI products bundle a monthly credit allowance into each plan, then sell top-ups. It works best when task costs vary widely, and only when you publish what a credit buys.
Key takeaways
- A credit is a private currency: you set the exchange rate between credits and dollars, and between credits and tasks.
- Credits let you keep a familiar monthly price while cheap and expensive actions are charged fairly.
- The backlash in 2025–26 came from abstract credits, shrinking allowances and hard stops, not from credits themselves.
- Publish a 'what things cost' table, roll credits over, cap spend by default and never take a customer offline.
- Prepaid credits are great for cash flow, but they're a liability on your balance sheet until they're used.
In the book, I used Fortnite as an example of freemium.
The game is free to play. But if your kids want the latest costumes and dances, someone has to pay. Fortnite also sells a subscription, Fortnite Crew, which gives subscribers a set amount of in-game currency every month, plus a few perks.
Think about what that does. The player never sees a dollar price on a dance. They see a price in the game's own currency. The subscription tops up their balance every month. And Epic gets to set the exchange rate.
That's credit-based pricing. And in 2026 it's how most AI is sold.
Lovable, ElevenLabs, Runway, Figma, HubSpot, Salesforce, Perplexity, Netlify and GitHub all sell credits now. So do five of the 44 companies that crossed $100M ARR this year. And credits have caused more customer anger than any other AI pricing decision.
So how do you get the benefits without the backlash? Let me show you.
What is credit-based pricing?
Credit-based pricing means customers buy or receive a balance of credits, then spend those credits on actions inside your product. Each action has a credit cost. A quick edit might cost half a credit. A whole landing page, a couple of credits. An hour of video, thousands.
There are three broad types:
| Type | How it works | 2026 examples |
|---|---|---|
| Dollar-pegged credits | One credit equals a fixed amount of money | Perplexity (100 credits = $1), HubSpot ($0.01 per credit), GitHub Copilot (dollar-denominated AI Credits) |
| Rate-card credits | Credits are abstract; a published table says what each action costs | Lovable, Netlify, Salesforce Flex Credits, Firecrawl, Atlassian Rovo |
| Capacity units | Credits meter compute or time | Snowflake credits ($2 to $4 by edition), Databricks DBUs, Midjourney Fast GPU hours |
Most AI products wrap credits in a subscription. You pay a monthly fee, you get a monthly allowance, and you can buy more if you run out. That's the "two clever ways to mix usage-based pricing with subscription" idea from Chapter Four of the book, in its 2026 form.
Why are AI companies moving to credit-based pricing?
Because one product now does wildly different jobs at wildly different costs.
Published estimates put a simple Manus chat at 10 to 50 credits and a "Wide Research" job at 800 to 1,500 or more. That's a 100-fold spread inside one subscription. A flat price can't cover that. A token price confuses non-technical buyers. Credits sit in the middle.
Here are the five reasons I see companies choose them:
- One currency covers many costs. Lovable's single balance pays for AI building, cloud hosting and in-app AI. SpaceXAI's X Subscription uses one weekly pool across Grok, Cursor and X, according to x.ai.
- Customers keep a predictable monthly price. The plan fee doesn't move. Only heavy users buy more.
- You can price actions by cost without exposing your costs. Customers see "3 credits," not your model bill.
- You get cash upfront. Prepaid packs are a form of the book's minimum commitment model. According to Pricing Innovation's analysis, more than half of Salesforce's Agentforce bookings came from credit refills by late fiscal 2026.
- There's a natural upgrade path. When customers run low, they move up a tier. Each step on ElevenLabs' ladder multiplies the allowance.
There's a sixth reason, and it's the dangerous one. Credits let you change the deal without changing the price. Change the rate card and the same $20 buys less. That's exactly what triggered most of the backlash below.
How do credits work? The eight moving parts
Every credit system is built from the same parts. Decide each one on purpose.
| Part | The question it answers | A good 2026 example |
|---|---|---|
| Exchange rate | What is one credit worth in money? | Perplexity: 100 credits = $1 |
| Rate card | What does each action cost in credits? | Microsoft Copilot Studio: classic answer 1, generative answer 2, agent action 5 |
| Allowance | How many credits does each plan include? | Figma: 3,000 AI credits per Professional Full seat per month |
| Rollover | What happens to unused credits? | ElevenLabs: roll over for two months, up to 3x the monthly quota |
| Top-ups | How do customers buy more, and at what price? | Lovable Pro: $15 per 50 credits, valid 12 months |
| Pooling | Are credits per user or shared? | Atlassian: Rovo credits pooled across the whole site |
| Caps and alerts | Who can stop runaway spend? | Lovable: admins cap credits per member, per project or per workspace |
| What happens at zero | Hard stop, slow mode or overage? | Midjourney: unlimited Relax mode after Fast hours run out |
Notice the last row. It matters more than any other.
Credit pricing examples: 15 rate cards compared
Here's what a credit is actually worth across 15 real products. I've worked out the effective price per credit from each plan's published price and allowance. Prices checked 27 October 2026; they change often, so see the AI Pricing Index for the latest.
| Company | Plan and price | Credits included | Effective price per credit | What a credit buys | Rollover |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lovable | Pro from $25 a month | 100 | $0.25 ($0.30 top-up) | "Make the button gray" = 0.50 credits | Expires 2 months after issue |
| Base44 | Builder $40 (annual) | 250 message credits | $0.16 | One AI building message (varies by model) | Not stated |
| Emergent | Standard $20 / Pro $200 | 100 / 750 | $0.20 / $0.27 | App-building work | Not published |
| ElevenLabs | Creator $22 | 121,000 | About $0.00018 | About one character of speech | 2 months, up to 3x quota |
| Runway | Standard $15 / Max $95 | 625 / 9,500 | $0.024 / $0.010 | 12 credits = one second of Gen-4.5 video | Max only, one month |
| Synthesia | Pro $89 monthly | 6,000 | About $0.015 | About 100 credits per minute of video | Reported none |
| Adobe Firefly | Pro $19.99 | 4,000 | $0.005 | Premium generations; standard ones unlimited | Resets monthly |
| Figma | Add-on pack, 5,000 credits | 5,000 | $0.03 PAYG / $0.024 subscribed | Any Figma AI feature (usage varies) | Not stated |
| Manus | Pro from $20 | 4,000 + 300 daily | $0.005 | Simple chat 10–50; deep research 500–900 | Daily credits don't roll |
| Perplexity | Max $200 | 10,000 a month | $0.01 (pegged) | Agent work in Perplexity Computer | Monthly refresh |
| HubSpot | Extra credits | $10 per 1,000 | $0.01 | 50 credits = one resolved support conversation | Assume none |
| Salesforce | Flex Credits | $500 per 100,000 | $0.005 | 20 credits = one standard agent action | Prepaid packs |
| Microsoft Copilot Studio | Pack $200 a month | 25,000 | About $0.008 ($0.01 PAYG) | 1 to 100 credits by action type | Resets monthly |
| Firecrawl | Standard $99 | 100,000 | About $0.001 | One page scraped | Scale tier only |
| Netlify | Pro from $20 | 3,000 | About $0.0067 | 15 credits per production deploy; 20 per GB bandwidth | Not stated |
The lesson from this table: credit values are all over the place, from $0.30 to a fraction of a cent. There's no standard. What matters is that customers can translate credits into the things they care about.
Look at Emergent's row too. Its $200 Pro plan works out more expensive per credit than its $20 plan. Maybe Pro includes other benefits that justify it, but as a rule, check your price per credit at each tier so the upgrade path rewards commitment.
Every company here has a full teardown, for example Lovable and ElevenLabs. The AI pricing examples page covers 40 companies across every model.
How to design a credit system in seven steps
Here's the method. I'll run a worked example right after it.
- List your actions and group them into a handful of types customers will recognize.
- Cost each action in model fees and other variable costs. Use the formula from the token pricing guide.
- Choose a target margin. For most AI products I'd aim for 70–80% on the rate card, so you still clear 60% once heavy users and top-tier discounts kick in.
- Set the credit value so your cheapest common action costs one to a few credits. Avoid fractions where you can.
- Build the rate card. Credits per action = cost ÷ (1 − margin) ÷ credit value, rounded up.
- Build the plan ladder. Each step should give more credits per dollar, or extra benefits such as rollover or concurrency.
- Decide the rules: rollover, top-up price, caps, alerts and what happens at zero.
Worked example: a credit system for an AI marketing studio
Step 1–2: actions and costs (model prices checked 27 October 2026)
| Action | How it's built | Cost to you |
|---|---|---|
| Social caption | Claude Sonnet 5.5, 1,500 tokens in, 300 out | $0.006 |
| Blog draft | Sonnet 5.5, 6,000 in, 2,500 out | $0.037 |
| Voiceover, per minute | Text-to-speech at about 1,000 characters a minute, bought at ElevenLabs Pro rates | About $0.165 |
| Research brief | 10-step agent on Sonnet 5.5 | About $0.75 |
Step 3–5: margin, credit value and rate card. Target 75% margin, credit value $0.01.
| Action | Credits | List value | Margin at $0.01 per credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social caption | 3 | $0.03 | 80% |
| Blog draft | 15 | $0.15 | 75% |
| Voiceover minute | 70 | $0.70 | 76% |
| Research brief | 300 | $3.00 | 75% |
Step 6: the ladder.
| Plan | Price | Credits | Price per credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $29 | 3,000 | $0.0097 |
| Growth | $79 | 10,000 | $0.0079 |
| Agency | $199 | 30,000 | $0.0066 |
| Top-up | $12.50 | 1,000 | $0.0125 (about 30% over Starter) |
Stress test: an Agency customer who uses every credit on research briefs pays $1.99 per brief that costs you $0.75. That's still a 62% margin. Your floor holds even for your heaviest, most committed customer.
That last line is the point of the exercise. Always check the margin at your cheapest price per credit, on your most expensive action.
Credit Pack DesignerTurn your cost per action into a credit rate card with healthy margins.Open the free tool →What goes wrong with credit-based pricing?
Credits aren't the problem. How companies changed them was. Here are the five patterns that caused trouble in 2025 and 2026.
"Abstract and unclear"
That's how Reddit users described Netlify's credits when it moved all new accounts to them in September 2025. Netlify charges 15 credits per production deploy and 20 per GB of bandwidth, which is published but hard to picture. Worse, its pricing page says that when one project exceeds its limits, all projects on the account are paused.
Never let a meter take a customer's product offline. Use a grace buffer, a slow mode or an auto top-up with a cap.
"You will get less, but pay the same price"
GitHub Copilot kept its plan prices when it moved to AI Credits on 1 June 2026, but Pro now shows "$15 monthly total credits": $10 base plus a $5 "flex allotment" that "may change over time." Developers noticed. Read how GitHub's users now pay by the credit.
"It was free, until it wasn't"
Figma gave every seat AI credits, then enforced the limits from 18 March 2026. A community thread is titled "Figma Make AI credit limits not feasible." Figma did the sensible things (admin visibility, add-on packs), but the enforcement still landed as a surprise.
"I can't predict what this will cost"
When one task can cost 10 credits and the next 1,500, customers can't plan. Exa solved this neatly for its agents: the caller picks an effort level, from $0.012 to $1.00 per request, so the price is known before the work starts. Show an estimate before expensive tasks run.
"One agent drained the whole pool"
HubSpot shares one monthly credit pool across every Breeze feature, so one busy agent can use up credits another team was counting on. Pooling is good. Pooling without per-feature or per-user caps is not.
What do customers praise in credit systems?
The good news is that the fixes are well known, and none of them is expensive.
- A "what things cost" table. Lovable lists the credit cost of real prompts on its pricing page and shows the cost of every message in your history.
- Generous rollover. ElevenLabs keeps unused credits for two months. Venice lets customers bank credits for two to three months.
- An unlimited fallback. Adobe keeps standard generations unlimited after premium credits run out. Midjourney offers unlimited Relax mode.
- Free everyday actions. Genspark charges zero credits for chat and image generation on paid plans (a promotion reported to run to 31 December 2026), and saves credits for heavy agent work.
- Caps on by default. Supabase ships with its spend cap switched on. Lovable's auto top-up is capped at 400 credits a month.
- Front-loaded annual credits. Apollo grants a year's credits upfront on annual plans, which rewards commitment without a discount.
- No charge for failures. Clay stopped charging for lookups that return no data when it repriced in March 2026.
Steal this
Before you launch, write the email you'd send customers if you had to change your rate card. If the email is embarrassing, your system is too opaque. Clay published its whole internal pricing memo when it changed, admitted its old Pro tier had run at a loss, and turned a risky change into a credibility win. Read how Clay unbundled data from work.
Turn your costs into a credit rate card
Enter your cost per action and target margin. The free Credit Pack Designer builds the rate card, the plan ladder and the top-up price for you.
Credits vs tokens vs subscriptions vs outcomes: which should you use?
Credits aren't always the answer. Here's how I'd choose.
| Use... | When... | Example |
|---|---|---|
| A flat subscription | Usage is light and costs are low and predictable | Slack bundles AI into its per-user plans |
| Tokens | Your buyers are developers who expect a meter | Every model API; Vercel v0 publishes its own token rates |
| Credits | Task costs vary 10x or more and buyers aren't technical | Lovable, Runway, ElevenLabs |
| A natural unit | One unit captures most of the value and cost | Deepgram per audio minute, Twilio per message |
| Outcomes | The result is countable and clearly valuable | Fin at $0.99 per resolution |
Credits are a translation layer. If your customers already think in a natural unit (minutes, messages, pages, resolutions), charge in that unit and skip the translation. ElevenLabs does both: credits for creative work, but a flat $0.08 per minute for voice agents on every tier.
For the outcome side, read outcome-based pricing. For the wider picture of usage meters in AI, see usage-based pricing for AI products.
The accountant's view: credits, cash flow and revenue
Here's the part most pricing guides skip, and it matters to any owner.
Prepaid credits are great for cash flow. Customers pay before you incur the model costs. That's the minimum commitment model from the book working in your favor.
But prepaid credits aren't revenue yet. Under the revenue standard Australian companies follow (AASB 15), cash received for credits customers haven't used yet is generally recorded as a liability, then recognized as revenue as the credits are used. Credits you expect never to be used ("breakage") have their own rules. Get the treatment right before you report ARR to investors or a buyer. See revenue recognition for subscriptions.
Your costs are in US dollars. If you sell credits in A$, your margin on each credit moves with the exchange rate. Price your rate card with a buffer and review it quarterly.
Watch the new Australian rules. If you sell auto-renewing credit plans to Australian consumers, the subscription-trap rules starting 1 July 2027 will affect how you disclose renewals and handle cancellation. See Australia's subscription trap laws. This is general information as at October 2026; get advice on your own setup.
Free Subscription Profit Review
Australian business owners can book a free 30-minute review with a BPAG Accountants adviser. An honest conversation about:
- whether a subscription model could work for your business
- how recurring revenue could cover your fixed costs each month
- how it could lift what your business is worth
No cost, no obligation. General information only until we understand your situation.
What to do next
- List and cost your actions. Use real token counts from your logs, not guesses. If you haven't set your overall pricing model yet, start with the AI pricing guide.
- Decide whether you need credits at all. If one natural unit covers most of your value, use it instead.
- Build the rate card and ladder with a 70–80% target margin, then stress-test your cheapest credit on your most expensive action.
- Publish the exchange rate: a table of what common tasks cost, right on the pricing page.
- Set the rules: rollover of at least a month, a 20–30% top-up premium, caps on by default and a soft landing at zero.
- Write your change policy now: how much notice you'll give and how you'll treat existing customers.
Then ask yourself the question every customer will ask: "What do I actually get for my money?" If you can answer it in one sentence, your credits will work.
Frequently asked questions
Is one credit the same as one token?
No. Tokens are the model vendor's unit of cost: text read and written by an AI model. Credits are your own unit of price, and one credit can cover tokens, GPU time, search calls or hosting. Many companies buy tokens and sell credits, with the margin sitting in the exchange rate between the two.
Should credits expire?
Some expiry is normal, but harsh expiry breeds resentment. ElevenLabs rolls unused credits over for two months, up to three times the monthly quota. Lovable's monthly plan credits expire two months after issue. Use-it-or-lose-it daily credits suit free tiers; paid credits should usually roll over for at least a month.
How many credit tiers should I offer?
Three to five is typical. Base44 has four paid tiers from $16 to $160, ElevenLabs five from $6 to $990. Make sure the price per credit falls, or the benefits rise, as customers move up. Otherwise you are penalizing your best customers for committing.
Can a non-AI business use credit-based pricing?
Yes. Class packs at a gym, prepaid hours with a consultant and print credits at a copy shop are all credit systems. The same rules apply: publish what each credit buys, let unused credits roll over for a while, and price packs so bigger commitments earn a better rate.
What is a good top-up price for extra credits?
Usually a premium to the plan rate, so plans stay the best deal. Clay cut its mid-cycle top-up premium from 50% to 30% in March 2026. Lovable's Pro top-ups cost $0.30 per credit against $0.25 inside a plan. A 20–30% premium nudges heavy users to upgrade without feeling punitive.
Do credits work for enterprise customers?
Yes, as a pooled allowance on top of seats. Glean, Atlassian and HubSpot all pool credits across an account so light users subsidize heavy ones, and Salesforce sells prepaid Flex Credit packs alongside fixed-price agreements. Enterprise buyers mostly want a predictable annual number, so pair credits with a committed annual pool.
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Robert Coorey, MBA
Robert is the author of The Subscription Playbook and Feed a Starving Crowd and a Director at BPAG Accountants in Sydney. More about Robert.
Sources
- Lovable: pricing (checked 27 Oct 2026)
- Lovable Docs: Credits and usage
- ElevenLabs: pricing (checked 27 Oct 2026)
- Clay: Introducing Clay's new pricing (11 Mar 2026)
- Netlify: pricing (checked 27 Oct 2026)
- Figma: Updates to AI credits in Figma (2026)
- Salesforce: Agentforce pricing (checked 27 Oct 2026)
- GitHub Blog: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing (27 Apr 2026)
- Perplexity Help Center: How credits work
- Firecrawl: pricing (checked 27 Oct 2026)
- Reddit r/Netlify: Netlify announces new plans and prices (Sep 2025)
Facts and prices checked 27 October 2026. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.