Understanding Credits

Credits are how you pay for the work Idea to Life performs: AI generation and the compute around it. This guide explains what consumes credits, how estimates work, and — just as important — which costs are not credits because they belong to third-party services you connect.

What credits pay for

• AI token usage: the models (OpenAI and Anthropic) read your idea, write the blueprint, generate code, and fix errors. Providers charge for this by token, and that usage is the largest component of credit cost.
• Build compute: assembling your project, installing dependencies, running checks, and managing the deployment pipeline during builds and change requests.

Bigger, more complex products consume more of both. A landing page costs far fewer credits than a booking system with accounts and email.

Estimates before you spend

Every build and every change request shows an estimated credit cost before you approve it. Nothing is charged until you confirm. Estimates are honest ranges, not teasers: actual usage can vary with how many attempts the repair loop needs, but the estimate is what we expect and we show it precisely so cost is a decision you make, not a surprise you discover.

After each build, your usage history shows what was actually consumed and on what.

Failed builds and the repair loop

When a build hits an error, the automatic repair loop retries with fixes, and those attempts consume tokens — that reality is built into estimates. If a build exhausts its retry limit and fails outright without delivering a working deployment, the failure is handled fairly on the credits side rather than billed as if it had succeeded; the failure screen states exactly how your balance was affected. You are never silently charged full price for nothing.

What credits do NOT cover

Credits pay Idea to Life for AI work. They do not cover the third-party accounts you own, which bill you directly:

• Render hosting: free tier exists, but always-on instances and databases cost money, billed by Render.
• Supabase: free tier exists with limits and inactivity pausing; paid tiers billed by Supabase.
• Domains: registration and renewal, billed by your registrar (for example Spaceship).
• Your own API keys (BYOK): if you connect your own OpenAI or Anthropic keys for your product's runtime AI features, those calls are billed by the provider to you, not in credits.

Your blueprint flags which of these the plan requires, before you build.

Buying and tracking credits

Credits are purchased in packs or through a subscription from the Billing page, which also shows your balance, full usage history, and per-project breakdowns. If a build would exceed your balance, you are told before it starts — never stranded mid-build.