There are two common ways to price an AI product: sell an unlimited plan, or give one number like “500 generations a month”. Both run into the same problem — the things being generated do not cost anything like the same.
A generation is not a generation
The real cost gap between one square image and ten seconds of high-quality video is not a factor of two; it is much larger. Put them in one quota and one of two things happens: the people generating video are subsidised, or the people generating images overpay.
On unlimited plans the outcome is quieter: there is a limit, it just is not written down. It shows up as a fair-use policy, a rate limit, or delays “due to demand”.
What a credit actually does
A credit does exactly one thing: it makes the different costs of different operations visible. An image costs this, a video scene costs that, a research run costs the other. You know your balance at the start of the month and you can see what an operation will cost before you run it.
That does not remove the complexity. It just stops hiding it from you.
The part to be honest about
The known weakness of credits is that “1,900 credits” means nothing as a sentence. For a number to be useful, its translation has to be printed next to it — how many images, how many seconds of video, how many reports.
So a balance on its own is not enough; it always needs the conversion beside it. A plan should be readable as “roughly this much work this month”.
The goal of pricing is not to look cheap. It is that nothing is a surprise at the end of the month.
When it is the wrong tool
Credits suit teams whose usage is hard to predict. For a team that produces the same thing in the same volume every month, they are unnecessary accounting — a fixed package is more honest there. You find out which team you are within two months.