Credit-based pricing, and how to work out what it will cost you
Credits are a unit vendors define and can redefine. How to convert a credit allowance into a real monthly figure before you commit.
Part of What AI tools actually cost, in time as well as money
Someone signs up for a free trial, tries the AI feature five times to see what it can do, and finds the balance is already gone. This is not a rare complaint about one product. It is the normal experience of credit-based pricing, and the reason is not that the vendor is stingy — Lovable's free tier grants five build credits a day, which is genuinely usable — but that nobody told the person signing up what a credit actually buys, so they had no way to pace themselves.
Before making the case against this model, the case for it deserves to be stated properly, because it is a real one. A flat subscription charges the same amount to someone who opens the tool twice a month and someone who runs it forty times a day — the light user subsidises the heavy one, or the price gets set high enough to cover the heavy user and the light one overpays. Usage billing fixes that. Charging for what something actually costs to run is the economically honest choice, and vendors calling an expensive model on every request have a legitimate reason to prefer it over a flat fee sized for the average case.
The problem is not the principle. It's that the unit being sold is invented by the vendor, consumed unevenly by the work, and rarely explained well enough to plan around — which makes credit pricing the one pricing model in this category you cannot compare between two products without doing arithmetic first.
What you're actually buying is unstated
A credit is not a currency with a fixed exchange rate. It is whatever the vendor decided it should represent this quarter — sometimes one AI call, sometimes a bundle of calls scaled by output size, sometimes a blend of unrelated actions drawn from the same pool. Framer's Basic plan includes 1,000 AI credits with no published per-action rate. Canva's free tier gives 200 "standard" and 20 "premium" AI uses, two different consumption speeds inside one number. Webflow sells AI credits as a separate add-on, at $20 a month billed annually or $25 monthly, on top of the site and workspace plans you're already paying. None of these tell you, from the pricing page alone, how far the number stretches.
Deriving cost per completed task, where it's possible
The only way to turn "1,000 credits" into a monthly figure you can trust is a disclosed per-action rate, and most vendors don't publish one. Webstudio does, and it's the model worth holding up: its Inception AI generation tool costs roughly a few cents per section, rising to around 70 cents for a full page. Generating fifteen pages a month lands somewhere under $11 in usage on top of the $15-a-month Pro subscription, billed annually — a number you can write down before you pay for anything, not one you discover on a statement.
That arithmetic only works because Webstudio named a real rate. Compare that to Bubble, where Workload Units meter page views, workflows, actions and searches into a single number, and the allowances circulating in comparison articles are third-party estimates the company has never confirmed. You cannot derive a cost per task from an unpublished formula. You can only wait for the invoice.
Charged before the work, not after it
Worth checking specifically: does the tool spend your balance when you ask for something, or only once it succeeds? Most credit systems charge on the attempt. If a generation comes back wrong and you ask for a correction, that's a second charge for the same piece of work, not a refund and a retry. Lovable users report exactly this pattern — the AI enters a repair loop, fixing one problem and introducing another, spending credits on every pass — and the free tier's five daily credits are reportedly gone in roughly three interactions, not enough to properly evaluate the tool before a card is required. That's what "charged before the work" means in practice: the meter runs on effort, not on whether the effort produced something usable.
Rollover, expiry, and what a repricing does to your model
Credits that don't roll over are a second, quieter meter running alongside the obvious one. Lovable's monthly allowance expires two months after it's granted; credits from an annual plan expire one month after the annual period ends. That's shorter than "use it within the year" sounds, and it means a slow month doesn't bank anything useful for a busy one later.
The harder problem is that a vendor can change what a credit is worth without changing what it costs. A subscription price is a number in a contract; a credit's purchasing power is whatever the vendor's internal cost model says this month, and there is no equivalent of a price-lock for the exchange rate. If an action that cost 5 credits starts costing 8, your existing allowance quietly does less than it did when you budgeted for it, and nothing about the sticker price moved. There's no hedge beyond re-checking the vendor's stated rate periodically rather than assuming last quarter's math still holds, which is also why this article carries a real update date rather than a one-time one.
Free and metered actions are rarely the same set
The number that matters more than the headline credit allowance is which specific actions draw from it. In most AI-assisted builders, browsing, plain editing, and basic layout changes are free — they don't call a model, so there's nothing to meter. What's metered is usually a narrower slice: an AI-driven rebuild, a full-page generation, an image variant. Canva splits its own allowance this way, between 200 free-feeling "standard" uses and 20 far more limited "premium" ones drawn from the same plan. Framer's AI Agents draw specifically from its credit pool while ordinary canvas editing does not.
This split is why two tools with the same headline number can feel completely different to use. A tool where most of your workflow sits in the free bucket and only the rare full regeneration is metered will last a month on a small allowance. A tool where every meaningful action pulls from the same pool will not, no matter how large the number on the pricing page.
| Tool | Included allowance | What draws from it |
|---|---|---|
| Framer Basic | 1,000 AI credits | AI Agents building pages; ordinary editing is separate |
| Canva Free | 200 standard + 20 premium AI uses | Two different consumption rates in one pool |
| Webstudio Pro | Credit-based, roughly cents to ~70 cents/page | Only the Inception generation tool |
| Lovable Free | 5 daily + 20 monthly Cloud credits, unified pool since June 2026 | Build, Cloud and AI-feature usage together |
Prices checked August 2026.
A worksheet for the month before you pay
Run this before the first invoice rather than after the third one. List every action in the tool that plausibly draws credits, not the marketing copy's description, the actual buttons. Spend a real week doing the work you'd normally do, on the free tier or a trial, and count how many times you hit each metered action rather than a free one. Multiply that weekly count by four for a rough month, and compare it against the plan's stated allowance. If the vendor publishes a per-action rate, multiply directly for a dollar figure, the way the Webstudio example above does. If it doesn't, treat the allowance as an unverified promise and budget for the tier above the one you think you need, because credit-metered tools tend to get used harder than trial weeks suggest. The general version of this worksheet, with the other four cost lines that sit alongside usage billing, is laid out in what AI tools actually cost.
When a flat subscription or a raw API bill is simply cheaper
Credits earn their keep when usage is genuinely spiky and a flat plan would be sized for the worst week rather than the typical one. They stop earning their keep once usage is steady, because a steady load is exactly what a flat subscription prices well and a credit system prices with a markup for the uncertainty the vendor is carrying on your behalf.
Two alternatives are worth checking before accepting the credit model as the only option. The first is a flat competitor doing the same job without a meter at all — Ghost's tiers are flat monthly prices with no usage axis, and self-hosted WordPress has no credits because the software is free and the cost is hosting, which is also flat. The second is paying the model provider directly rather than through a vendor's marked-up credit — the provider's real per-token rate, with no packaging markup, at the cost of losing the interface built on top of it. That trade-off, and when it's worth making, is covered in API costs versus subscriptions.
The test that decides it: if you can name the vendor's per-action rate and multiply it by a month you're confident about, credits are a reasonable, even fair, way to pay for uneven usage. If you can't name that rate — if the answer to "what does one generation cost" is a shrug, or a page that contradicts itself the way Butternut's pricing page and its own FAQ quote different credit figures for the same plan — that's not a pricing model, it's a bill you haven't seen yet. Free tiers exist to run this test without a card on file, and which ones are worth using for that is covered in the free tiers worth taking seriously.
Questions people ask
- How many credits does an AI tool actually use per task?
- Only if the vendor publishes a per-action rate can you know this in advance. Where the rate is disclosed, as with Webstudio's few cents per section, you can multiply by the work you plan to do. Where it isn't, the only way to find out is to run a real trial and count.
- Do unused credits roll over to the next month?
- Vendor-specific and worth checking before signing up rather than after. Lovable's monthly credits expire two months after they're granted and its annual credits expire one month after the annual period ends, which is a shorter runway than the billing cycle suggests.
- Do I get credits back if an AI generation fails or needs a retry?
- Usually not. Most credit systems charge on the attempt, not the outcome, so a failed run or a correction pass spends the same balance as a successful one. Check specifically whether the vendor's terms mention refunds for failed generations, because most pricing pages simply don't say.
- Is a flat subscription always more predictable than credit-based pricing?
- Not automatically, but usually. A flat plan can still hide seat creep or a renewal-price jump, and a well-disclosed credit rate can be perfectly forecastable. The difference is that a subscription requires no arithmetic and a credit system does.