About credits

Every generation and export in Content Studio draws from a credit balance rather than being billed as a flat, per-project fee. That choice isn’t incidental — it follows from a simple fact about the work itself: a two-minute product demo and a ninety-minute training video are not the same job. Describing the ninety-minute video means far more for our tool to analyze, more narration to write, more review passes if you ask for higher quality. A flat per-project price would have to either overcharge the short, simple projects to subsidize the long ones, or undercharge on the long ones and lose money on every single one. Metering by the unit of work — minutes of video, pages of a PDF, number of images — lets the cost track what’s actually being done, rather than forcing every project through the same price regardless of size.

That’s also why credits are a single currency across the whole product rather than separate wallets per project type. Whether you’re generating audio descriptions for a video, remediating a PDF, or writing alt text for a batch of product photos, it’s the same underlying resource being spent, so it makes sense to draw it from the same balance. You don’t need to reason about “video credits” versus “PDF credits” — you have credits, and different actions cost different amounts of them depending on how much work they represent. The exact costs per action live in Plans and credit costs; this page is about the shape of the system, not the numbers.

Two kinds of balance

Depending on your plan, your credits come from two places that behave differently. There’s a monthly allotment — an amount included with your plan that refreshes on your billing cycle, the way a subscription’s included usage typically does. Separately, paid plans also earn a bonus credit percentage on top of that allotment, and unlike the monthly amount, bonus credits don’t expire. The practical effect is that your monthly allotment is meant to cover your typical month of work, resetting whether or not you used it all, while the bonus portion behaves more like a standing reserve you build up over time and can lean on when a particular month runs heavier than usual — a large batch of PDFs, an unusually long video, a push before a deadline. If you’re deciding how to buy more credits or which plan gives you the most headroom, that’s a billing decision — see Choose a plan and manage billing.

Why some things are free

Not everything in Content Studio costs credits. SRT export, for instance, is free. The distinguishing line isn’t “is this a video feature” or “is this an export” — it’s whether the action asks our tool to do new work. Generating audio descriptions, running a PDF through remediation, writing alt text for an image: these all involve our tool analyzing content and producing something new, and that’s what credits pay for. Exporting an SRT file, by contrast, is just packaging captions you’ve already generated (and already paid to generate, if generation was involved) into a standard subtitle format. No new AI work happens at export time, so there’s no charge for it. The same logic is why editing something you’ve already generated — adjusting a caption’s timing, tweaking a description’s wording in the editor — doesn’t re-trigger a charge on its own; the charge is for producing the content, not for touching it afterward.

Where this connects

Processing quality settings (Standard versus Enhanced) change what a given generation costs, because Enhanced does more work per description — see About getting good accessible output for a view on when that trade-off is worth it. If you’re working inside an organization, credits work a little differently again: they’re pooled across the team rather than tied to one person’s account, which is covered in About personal accounts and organizations. And for the concrete step-by-step of adding credits or switching plans, go to Choose a plan and manage billing.