AI credits: how credit-based pricing works

How much is one AI credit worth?

There is no standard. Each vendor picks a dollar value and decides what a credit buys. The values below come from vendor pages. Prices checked November 10, 2026.

• How Locus Pro credits work

Why do AI products sell credits instead of dollars?

One balance can cover many kinds of cost. Lovable uses a single credit balance for building, chat, hosting, AI calls inside deployed apps, and connectors such as Perplexity and Firecrawl. GitHub charges AI credits for chat and agent sessions, while code completions stay unlimited on paid plans.

Credits also let you change what an action costs without changing plan prices, and prepaid credits bring in cash before your providers bill you.

The cost is clarity. When a credit has no fixed dollar value, customers cannot compare prices or predict a bill. A quiet change in credits per action then reads as a hidden price rise.

How do I set the credit price of each action?

Fix the dollar value of one credit first. Then price each action from its cost and a target margin: credits = cost ÷ (1 − margin) ÷ credit value, rounded up to a whole credit.

The example uses a $0.01 credit and a 40% target margin. Costs are Locus Pro catalog base prices from November 10, 2026. The research task is Claude Sonnet 5.5 with 20,000 input and 2,000 output tokens, plus three Brave web searches.

Rounding up to whole credits adds margin on cheap actions. A credit that is too large forces big rounding. One that is too small makes prices hard to read.

Should AI credits expire?

Treat credits you give away apart from credits customers buy. Included and promotional credits can expire each period. Purchased credits that disappear feel like a lost payment and invite disputes.

Real rules: Locus Pro's included monthly credits expire at period end, and purchased credits do not. Lovable rolls unused plan credits over but expires them 2 months after issue on monthly plans, and expires top-ups after 12 months. GitHub's included allowance resets every month.

If you run credits on Stripe Billing, a credit grant never expires unless you set an expiry date. Stripe's rules also bar using billing credits as gift cards or stored value, or to pay other businesses.

How do I give each customer a credit balance with Locus Pro?

Locus Pro Enterprise keeps one credit balance for each customer of your product, at 1,000 credits to the dollar by default. Customers top up by card through Locus-hosted checkout or the embeddable balance widget. Or you sell credits your own way and allocate them from your pool.

Each call names the customer with X-Locus-End-User and draws their balance at the catalog base price plus your markup. Example: Deepgram transcription is about 4.343 credits per audio minute in the catalog, so a 30-minute recording costs 130.29. With a 25% markup the customer pays about 162.86 credits and you keep about 32.57, roughly $0.033.

The customer sees a balance in credits. You see charges, margin and usage grouped by customer in the ledger and analytics. Locus Pro prices only the calls it runs, so credits for your own features, such as seats or exports, belong in your billing system.

• Locus Pro for platforms
• Plans and included credits

How do I choose a credit design?

Credits suit products where the cost per action varies and buyers want to prepay. Plain dollar prices are clearer when you sell one kind of usage.

• Publish a fixed dollar value per credit, even if the product shows only credits.
• Price each action in whole credits from cost plus margin, and publish the table.
• Show an estimate or a check-in before expensive actions. Lovable pauses a long build when it crosses a check-in level, 20 credits by default.
• Let purchased credits last at least a year, and let included credits expire.
• Put many cost types on one balance only if customers can see where their credits went.
• If your credits pay for third-party API calls, Locus Pro gives you the balance, the calls and a per-customer ledger in one place.