Console and chat
Credits
Where a workspace's credit comes from, how it is spent, what the Credits screen shows, and what happens at zero.
ExplanationFor users
Credit is prepaid, in dollars, per workspace. Every generation is metered inside the enclave and debited from the balance. The ledger is append-only: a correction is a new row, never an edit, and every write carries an idempotency key, so a retried charge cannot debit twice.
Where credit comes from
| Kind | When |
|---|---|
| Invitation credit | Redeemed inside account creation, once per account, when you sign up through an invitation link or type its code. The row names the campaign |
| Sign-up credit | A deployment-wide grant to every new account, set by the administrator at deploy time. It stacks with an invitation |
| Feedback credit | A second grant offered once the first has been used up, in exchange for a short form. The offer appears on Credits when the balance falls below the deployment's threshold and the account has actually sent requests |
| Purchase | A card payment through Stripe, where the deployment sells credit |
| Usage | A debit per generation, with the generation id as its reference |
There is no "create credit" screen and no API for it: minting is a deployment setting, an invitation, the feedback grant, or an operator's command-line action. The production deployment does not sell credit; its Credits screen says so: This deployment does not sell credit. Nothing here can be paid for by card.
The screen
Credits shows the balance, the Buy credits card where purchases are on (Paid by card through Stripe. Credit appears on the balance once Stripe confirms the payment.), Auto top-up (Buy credits automatically when the balance drops below a threshold, using the card saved by your last checkout.), and Recent transactions with Date, Kind, Description, Amount, Receipt.
After a sign-up through an invitation the console lands here first, with a welcome card that confirms the grant arrived or explains why it did not.
At zero
A request that would take the balance below zero answers 402 insufficient_credits. One in-flight generation may push the balance negative by its own cost and no more. A key with its own Spend limit stops earlier, with 402 key_spend_limit_reached.
What a generation costs
Debit is tokens in times the input price plus tokens out times the output price, per million tokens, rounded up to one micro-dollar. Prices are on Models and are frozen per generation: a price change never re-prices a row already written. usage.cost_micros on every API response is the exact figure debited.