Reading costs nothing. Credits only come into play when the app generates something for you: a chapter, a helper suggestion, an image. Two separate pools pay for that, text credits and image credits, and both refill monthly.This guide explains where your balances live, what each action costs, how to see a price before you click, and what the free beta premium upgrade actually unlocks.
Open User Settings and switch to the Account tab. Four rows show your balances: Available free text credits and Purchased text credits pay for all text generation, Available free image credits and Purchased image credits pay for images. Free and purchased balances of a pool are simply added together when you spend.Text and image credits are separate pools, each split into free and purchased.The free balances reset every calendar month and unused credits do not carry over. The small help icon next to each free row shows exactly when: Next reset in N days.The help icon tells you how long until the monthly refill.
During the beta there is nothing to buy. Premium itself is free, see the last section.
What things cost
Every text price follows one formula: model factor × action rate. The default model has factor 1.0, a cheaper one runs at 0.8, and the strongest Flash models cost up to 6.0. The action rate depends on what you generate:
Story chapters are the baseline: rate 1. A standard chapter on the default model costs exactly 1 credit, regardless of the Chapter Length picked on the Config step: all four length options bill the same.
Long-form chapters (extra-long short-story chapters) cost 2.5 times the chapter rate.
One-shot short stories generate a complete story in one go and cost 3 times the chapter rate.
Ideas, helpers & analysis (option generators, outlines, summaries, analyzers) are cheap at 0.125.
Research briefs run grounded web search and cost 2.5, because every search query is billed separately by the provider.
Images come out of the separate image-credit pool. One image costs between 0.5 and 1.7 image credits depending on the model, and stories in Anchor consistency mode pay 1.5 times the plain price because a reference image rides along with every generation.
Prices are fixed per generation. A chapter costs the same whether it turns out short or long.
Seeing a price before you spend
View full pricing → at the bottom of the Account tab opens the Full pricing overview. It lists the text cost grid per model and action, the image models with their per-image price, and the Monthly allowances by tier table with your own tier marked.Every model and every action rate in one grid. Zero-cost actions show as free.The tier table shows the monthly text and image allowances, with your tier marked.You also never have to leave the page you are on. Every AI button row has a Model button, and its tooltip previews the effective model plus the cost, for example ≈ 1 credit(s) / generation with the factor breakdown. Image generation shows a warning and disables the button when the requested batch exceeds your remaining image credits.Hover the Model button anywhere to see what the next generation will cost.
Premium, free during the beta
Premium raises your monthly allowances to 75 text credits and 15 image credits and unlocks the premium features: Use Own LLM for text and images (generation through your own key costs no credits at all), custom choices via Do something else… , chapter export as picture, custom validation prompts, and the Preset and Anchor image consistency modes .While the beta runs, the upgrade is a single click. Non-premium accounts see a Go premium – free during beta button at the top of the Account tab. Press it and your badge switches to Premium (beta). There is no payment step.One click, no payment during the beta. A verified e-mail is required.
The upgrade needs a verified e-mail address. If the click fails with a verification message, confirm the link in your verification mail first, then try again.
Converting between pools
Premium accounts can trade between the two pools. The Convert credits section, right below the four balance rows on the Account tab, lets you turn text credits into image credits or the other way around, in whole image-credit units.
Pick a direction with the dropdown: Text → Image or Image → Text.
Enter how many image credits you want to convert (a whole number, at least 1).
Press Convert. Your balances update immediately and the exchange preview above the dropdown shows the current rate.
The two directions trade at different rates on purpose: 5 text credits buy 1 image credit, but converting back only returns 2.5 text credits per image credit. A round trip costs half.
Free and purchased credits never mix in a conversion. A free credit always converts into a free credit and a purchased credit always converts into a purchased credit, so the notice above the Convert button is worth reading: your monthly free balances reset to your tier's values each month, converted free credits do not carry over, and purchased credits are unaffected.
Best practices
Hover the Model button before any generation. The tooltip shows the exact cost, so a surprise is never necessary.
Match the model to the task: the 0.8-factor model is fine for experiments, 3.5 Flash-Lite costs 1.6, and the 5.2 to 6.0 Flash models are best reserved for work that needs their extra capability.
Free credits expire monthly. Spending them near the end of the month costs you nothing extra, letting them lapse does.
Take the free beta upgrade early. It multiplies your monthly allowance and unlocks bring-your-own-LLM, which makes text generation free entirely.
Helpers are cheap by design at 0.125. Use idea generators and analyzers freely, they cost an eighth of a chapter.
Under the hood
All prices are resolved server-side. The client never sends a cost, and anything the backend cannot classify bills at the full chapter rate instead of riding for free.The action rates are billing-class multipliers on the backend: chapter 1.0, long-form chapter 2.5, one-shot 3.0, helper 0.125, image-prompt helper 0.05, grounded research 2.5.Monthly allowances per tier: free accounts get 10 text credits and no image credits, premium (tier 1) gets 75 and 15, Premium plus (tier 2) 200 and 40. Allowances refill lazily on the first balance read of a new calendar month and do not accumulate.The beta upgrade calls a self-service endpoint that sets tier 1. It is idempotent, so repeated clicks change nothing, and it returns an error when the account's e-mail is not verified.Image billing is per image and per model (factors 0.5 to 1.7), with a 1.5x surcharge when Anchor consistency mode attaches a reference image. Every generated image in a batch is billed, whether you keep it or not.Conversion is premium-only and allocates per unit: each image-credit unit converts entirely from the free pool or entirely from the bought pool, never split across both, so a conversion can never turn a free (quest-earned) credit into a permanent bought one. A request the bought pool can't fully cover is rejected outright rather than partially filled.
