Credits are what AI work costs. Your plan includes a monthly allowance; each AI action deducts from it.

Chatting with Joe is free. So is manual editing, reading things back, and extracting a brand voice.

The essentials

• Credits are pooled per account. One balance, shared by every blog and every team member. Not per-seat, not per-blog.
• Your allowance refills each billing cycle. Higher plans include more.
• Each action has a price. A full research-and-write costs many times what a short inline edit does, because it does many times as much. The exact cost varies by plan, and the interface always shows it before you commit — you can't start a run you can't afford.
• Failures are refunded automatically. If a generation fails, you don't pay for it. This is enforced in the billing layer, not left to goodwill.
• Voice extraction is free.

Roughly what things cost, relative to each other

You'll see exact figures in the app; this is the shape of it:

• Cheapest — an inline edit at your cursor, a repurpose destination, an AI-pattern check.
• Middling — SEO generation, link suggestions, a competitor analysis, a topic-discovery run.
• More — live web research, a draft, a refresh, humanising, an AI-generated cover image.
• Most — the full pipeline, which is research plus draft plus SEO plus links, and priced accordingly.

Running low

If an action needs more credits than you have, it won't start. You'll get a single prompt showing your balance with two ways out: buy a top-up or upgrade. Nothing runs halfway and leaves you with a broken post.

We email you before you run out, not after.

Check your live balance and this cycle's usage in Settings → Billing, in the sidebar meter, or by asking Joe.

Allowance versus top-ups

Two buckets:

• Monthly allowance — resets each cycle. Use it or lose it.
• Top-ups — bought separately, and they persist across cycles rather than resetting.

The usage meter shows used out of total, where total accounts for both. When it says you've used 80% of your total, that's the moment to decide between a top-up and an upgrade.

Keeping the bill predictable

• Autopilot has a hard budget cap per blog — a monthly credit ceiling it will not cross. Set it. The forecast shown during setup is an estimate; the cap is enforced.
• The setup wizard forecasts the monthly cost of the volume you're asking for, before you switch it on.
• Joe shows the total before a batch and waits for you to confirm.

Joe can read your balance and estimate costs, but never makes purchases. Buying credits and changing plans is always something you do yourself, and he never sees card details.