Guide
AI Credits & Usage
Understand how AI credits work, how they are consumed, and how to monitor your usage
What you'll learn
- Understand what AI credits are
- Know which actions consume credits
- Monitor your usage from the dashboard
- Learn what happens when credits run out
Overview
AI credits measure AI usage in AlphaTales. Actions such as Project Breakdown, Market Research, Application Workflow generation, feature generation, PRD generation, and Technical Architecture generation can use credits.
What Are AI Credits?
AI credits are included with your subscription plan. Each time you trigger an AI generation, AlphaTales uses credits based on the action and its complexity.
Reviewing, editing, selecting, or saving existing content does not normally use new credits. Credits are used when you ask AlphaTales to generate or regenerate AI output.
Which Actions Use Credits?
Common credit-using actions include:
- Project Breakdown - Validating and structuring a product idea.
- Market Research - Generating research, risk, opportunity, and competitive context.
- Application Workflow - Generating the application flow map and detailed workflow nodes.
- Feature generation - Creating grouped feature titles and feature details.
- PRD generation - Creating a Product Requirements Document.
- Technical Architecture - Generating architecture style, stack recommendations, and a diagram.
Tip: Review and edit generated output before regenerating. A small manual edit often saves more credits than starting over.
View Your Usage
You can check AI credit usage from the sidebar or account/subscription area. The usage summary may show:
- Credits used - How many credits you have consumed in the current period.
- Credits remaining - How many credits are still available.
- Plan limits - The allowance included with your plan.
- Reset timing - When applicable, when credits refresh.
Plan Limits
Your plan controls how many credits are available and which AI actions you can run. Free plans usually have tighter limits, while paid plans have larger allowances and more access.
Team plans may share usage across the organization, depending on the account setup.
When Credits Run Out
When credits run out or a plan limit blocks an action:
- AI generation buttons may be disabled.
- The page may show an upgrade or usage message.
- You can still review and edit existing project material.
- Credits may refresh later, or you can upgrade if the product offers that option.
If a generation fails before producing a result, follow the message shown on the page. Retry only when the page says the action is safe to retry.
Next Steps
Read Tips for Better AI Results to improve your inputs before spending credits on generation.