How it works
The product defines what one credit buys: one chat message, one second of video, 1,000 tokens. Customers acquire credits through purchase, a subscription allowance, a free trial grant, or a referral reward, and the product deducts credits as features are used.
Because the price lives in two places, the money-to-credits rate and the credits-per-action cost, either can change independently. You can raise the cost of an expensive model from 2 to 3 credits without touching checkout, or run a sale on credit packs without changing what anything costs inside the app.
Example
An AI writing app sells 500 credits for $10, so each credit is worth $0.02 to the customer. A short draft costs 1 credit and a long-form article costs 8. If the article costs the app $0.05 in model fees, it earns $0.16 − $0.05 = $0.11 in gross profit per article before payment fees.
Application credits in Cred
You define your own credit types per project and decide in your server code how many credits each action deducts. They are distinct from CRD, the platform credit you spend to call the cred.diy API (1 CRD per call).
Getting Started docsQuestions
- Are application credits money?
- Usually not. Most products make credits non-transferable, non-refundable for cash, and usable only inside the product, which keeps them a prepaid service balance rather than stored value. If credits can be cashed out or sent between users, get legal advice on your jurisdiction.
- Why use credits instead of charging in dollars?
- Credits give one unit across features with very different costs, let you adjust pricing without rewriting checkout, and make balances easy to show in the UI. Customers see how many generations remain instead of a fractional dollar amount.
