AI credit pricing calculator
Turn what each AI request costs you into a price per credit and a set of credit packs that keep your margin after Stripe fees. Runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.
- Cost per credit
- $0.01
- Markup on cost
- 3.69×
- Credits per $1
- 27
This rate covers the percentage fee. The fixed fee per charge is spread over each pack below, so small packs need a higher price to hold 70.0%.
| Credits | At flat rate | Margin | Suggested price | Per credit | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | $3.69 | 61.9% | $4.80 | $0.048 | 70.0% |
| 500 | $18.45 | 68.4% | $19.56 | $0.03912 | 70.0% |
| 1,000 | $36.91 | 69.2% | $38.01 | $0.03801 | 70.0% |
| 5,000 | $184.55 | 69.8% | $185.61 | $0.03712 | 70.0% |
At flat rate is the pack size × price per credit, which is what a custom-amount checkout charges. Suggested price covers the fixed fee too, rounded up to the cent; margins are after payment fees and your usage cost.
How to price credits.
Four numbers decide a credit price: what usage costs you, how much usage a credit buys, the margin you need, and what the payment processor takes.
1. Start from your cost per unit
Find the unit you actually pay for upstream: tokens for a language model, images for a diffusion model, minutes for transcription, or requests for a third-party API. Use your provider's current price list, and include anything else that scales with each request, such as storage, GPU time, retries and the 1 CRD each Cred API call uses. If a feature calls several models, add their costs together.
2. Decide what one credit buys
Choose a rate card that customers can read at a glance: one credit per message, ten per image. Units per credit times cost per unit is your cost per credit. Credits that are worth roughly one to five cents are easy to reason about; much smaller values lead to balances in the hundreds of thousands, much larger ones make small actions awkward to price.
3. Set a margin, then add payment fees
Gross margin here means what is left of each dollar after usage cost and payment fees. The price per credit is cost per credit divided by one minus the margin and the percentage fee: at a $0.01 cost, a 70% margin and Stripe's standard 2.9%, that is $0.01 ÷ 0.271, about $0.0369. The fixed $0.30 per charge does not scale with credits, so it is spread over each pack rather than built into the rate.
4. Size packs so fees stay small
A 100-credit pack at $0.0369 is $3.69, and $0.41 of that goes to card fees, so the margin falls to about 62%. The suggested column raises small packs just enough to keep the target, or you can drop packs whose suggested per-credit price looks unattractive. Larger pricing tiers can then offer a visible discount and still clear your margin. Recheck the numbers whenever your model costs change, and consider auto top-up so customers buy larger packs less often instead of many small ones.
Cred stores each credit type's price as USD per credit, which custom amount checkout multiplies by the number of credits, and sells fixed packs as pricing tiers. The flat-rate column above uses the same calculation that checkout charges with.
Pricing credits
- How do I calculate the price of one credit?
- Multiply your cost per unit of usage by the units one credit buys to get your cost per credit, then divide by one minus your target margin and the percentage payment fee. At a $0.01 cost, a 70% margin and a 2.9% card fee, that is $0.01 ÷ 0.271 ≈ $0.0369 per credit.
- Why do small credit packs need a higher price per credit?
- Stripe's standard pricing adds a fixed 30¢ to every successful domestic card charge on top of 2.9%. On a $3 pack that fee is 10% of the price; on a $100 pack it is 0.3%. To keep the same margin, small packs need a higher price per credit or a larger minimum size.
- What gross margin should an AI product target for credits?
- There is no single right number. Pick a margin that covers what the cost per unit leaves out, such as support, failed requests, free trials, and model price changes, and compare the resulting price per credit with what customers pay for alternatives.
- Does this calculator include Cred's platform fee?
- Not separately. Each Cred API call, such as a deduct, uses 1 CRD, so add your per-call platform cost to your cost per unit if you want it reflected in the price.
- Is my data sent anywhere?
- No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser and makes no network requests.
Your first credit is
one request away.
No card needed to start.