How credits work
Credits are how Poleved meters AI work. Every run is priced from the tokens it really used, so a quick tweak costs far less than a full build.
What a credit is
A credit is one unit of AI usage. Your plan gives you a monthly allowance:
| Plan | Credits per period |
|---|---|
| Spark (free) | 150 |
| Maker | 1,500 |
| Studio | 5,000 |
| Foundry | 15,000 |
The allowance resets at the start of each billing period and does not roll over.
Credits are not money. The balance you earn from selling on Showcase is a separate thing, held in rupiah. You can convert that balance into credits — but only in that direction: credits never turn back into money.
How a run is priced
A run is one AI execution: a prompt you send, a step of a plan, a design round, a mobile scaffold.
- When a run starts, 1 credit is held against your allowance. The chip under the message reads
≈1.00 cr…— a placeholder, not a price. - When the run finishes, that hold is dropped and replaced by the real cost, metered from the tokens the run consumed.
- The chip settles to the final figure, for example
1.42 cr.
A typical prompt lands near 1 credit. Short questions cost less; long builds that read a lot of your codebase cost more. No single run is charged more than 25 credits — above that the platform absorbs the difference.
What uses credits
| Action | What it costs |
|---|---|
| A prompt | One run, metered from its tokens |
| Each step of a plan | Metered when that step runs |
| A design round | One run; the screen count is an estimate |
| A design revision | A new run, metered from its tokens |
| Generating mobile screens | One run; the screen count is an estimate |
| Retrying | Full price again — a retry re-runs the work |
| Stopping a run | Charged for the tokens it used before the stop |
| Approving a plan or a design | Free |
| Answering Ask first questions | Free |
| An AI call your deployed app makes | Metered from its tokens — see AI |
Screen counts and plan totals shown before you confirm are estimates, not quotes. The charge always comes from the tokens the run really used.
AI features spend this same balance. Once a project has AI enabled, every model call its live app makes is metered here too — including calls made by your visitors. That is why each project also carries a daily cap you set yourself.
Choosing a model
The model chip beside Generate shows an estimated cost per typical prompt on that model — the smallest sits well under 1 credit, the largest above it. A bigger model is more capable and burns credits faster: on real work the most expensive model costs roughly 1.7× the standard one. That is far less than the gap in headline token prices, because most of a run's tokens go on re-reading context rather than writing new output.
Your model choice sticks for that project until you change it.
Model prices can change. Changes apply to future runs only — runs that already settled are never re-priced.
When you run low
- At 80% and 95% of your allowance you get a warning.
- Once the allowance is used up, the next run is refused with Out of credits. A run already in progress finishes and is still charged.
- A plan that runs out stops between steps. Add credits, then press Retry on the step that stopped — finished steps are not repeated.
To get more credits: top up (below), upgrade on the pricing page, or wait for the period to reset.
Buying extra credits
On a paid plan you can top up without changing plan. Open billing and use Top up credits:
- Pay with card — the per-credit price is shown on the top-up panel before you commit, and the total is worked out from it. Prices are set in US dollars and charged in rupiah. The credits appear once the payment settles, which can take a moment after the popup closes.
- Use Showcase balance — converts money you have already earned, at the same rate. It spends withdrawable balance only, so earnings still inside their 14-day hold cannot be used yet.
Top-up credits sit in a separate pocket from your monthly allowance:
- Your allowance is always spent first. The wallet only pays for what is left over.
- They do not reset at the end of a period — but they expire 12 months after purchase. The panel shows the expiry date for every purchase, including ones that have already lapsed.
- They are not refundable, and cannot be turned back into money.
The status strip counts them: with credits in the wallet it stays amber instead of turning red, because your runs still work.
Buying is limited to paid plans. On Spark the panel says so and points at pricing instead.
When you are not charged
Runs that fail on our side settle at zero: a build environment that died, an expired credential, a queue that could not place your run. No cost chip appears on those.
Two cases are still charged, and it is worth knowing why:
- A run that hits its time limit. It did the work and consumed the tokens.
- A run that finishes with Build issues. The AI produced code that may not build, but it produced it. When the platform's checks find a problem it also spends one automatic fix attempt before giving up, and that attempt is part of the same run's cost — so a run that had to be repaired reads higher than one that passed first time.
Reading your usage page
Your usage page shows the current period plus a month-by-month history. Two columns look similar and are not:
- Credits — what you spent against the allowance. This is the figure the status badge judges.
- AI runs — how many runs happened. A plan spends more credits than it has runs, so these rarely match.
A month showing — and not recorded had runs but no recoverable credit figure: it predates credit metering. Deleting a project used to erase its runs' credits as well, so a month from before that fix can read low — that no longer happens.
Limits & notes
- 1 credit is held while a run is in flight; the final cost replaces it, and is usually lower.
- Maximum 25 credits per run.
- Estimates for plans, designs and mobile screens are estimates, not fixed prices.
- Retries cost full price every time.
- Deleting a project does not return the credits its runs already spent.
- Credits do not carry over between periods. Top-up credits do, until they expire.
- Top-up credits expire 12 months after purchase and are not refundable.
- Your monthly allowance is spent before any top-up credits.
- Buying credits requires a paid plan.
- Runs started by a collaborator are billed to the project owner.
- Limits may change during alpha.