---
title: "How AI credits work"
category: "Credits & billing"
source: "https://getbloggable.com/help/ai-credits"
updated: 2026-10-22T10:34:35.514Z
---

# How AI credits work

**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.