How Credits Work in Chat Octopus

A credit is the unit Chat Octopus charges in. Trimming a clip, styling captions, rendering a video, all of it draws credits as the job runs, and the running total for that conversation sits in a small credit counter at the top right of the chat. Your account came with some for free, more land every day you use it, and if you run out mid-job, work pauses there.

What you get for free

Signing up needs no card, and new accounts get 500 credits right away; in your credit history that grant is still labelled "Beta credits", which is just the name for the signup grant. That batch never expires. On top of that, if you're on the free plan and you've had a chat going in the last thirty days, you get 30 more credits every day, dropped straight into the same balance. That daily drip caps at 210 credits: once you're sitting on that much from the drip alone, it stops adding more until you spend some down.

Keep using Chat Octopus and the daily credits never lapse, because every new day's drip pushes its own expiry another seven days ahead. Stop using it for about a month, though, and the drip stops arriving, and whatever's left of it goes about a week after that. The Daily credits row in your history carries the countdown, "expires in 6 days" and similar, and that date moves forward every day you're active.

Your settings, under billing, show the balance with a line under it: on the free plan that line reads "30 free credits arrive every day"; on a paid plan it shows the date your plan renews. Once you've scheduled a plan change, that renewal line drops and a note at the top of the page says which plan you're on until which date, and what you move to then.

What a job actually costs

There's no fixed price list, because a two-second trim and a full video render don't cost the same, and prices change as our costs do. What you get instead is the real number, not an estimate, in the conversation's credit counter. If you want a rough sense of scale before you start, the pricing page runs a calculator with real rates for common jobs, such as video generation, edited clips, images, voiceovers, and music.

Watching the number go down

Select the credit counter and it opens into a receipt, one line per message, so you can see exactly what each request in the thread charged.

Your credit history, in settings, holds every grant and every charge you've had, going back further than any one conversation. In your first week or two you'll mostly see Beta credits (your signup 500) and Daily credits, with a Usage row for what each job spent. A Refunded row shows up if a job failed, an Invite reward if a friend joined from your link, and Plan credits or Top-up once you buy either.

Rows still holding credits show when those credits go; the ones that never expire just show the date they landed. Settings shows the last three rows to start, "Show all" opens the rest, and "Load more" fetches further back.

A job spends whatever expires soonest first: the daily drip, then plan credits. Among the credits that never expire, the oldest go first, so your signup 500 gets used before a top-up you bought last week.

What happens when you run out

If your balance runs dry mid-job, Chat Octopus stops right there and tells you you're out; whatever the job had already spent before that point stays spent. Add credits and select Continue: it picks up right where the reply stopped, but that's a new message, and it costs credits the same as any other turn. From there you can wait for the next daily drip if you're on the free plan, buy credits, or invite a friend from settings under billing; once they join from your link you get 500 credits.

A job that fails usually costs you nothing. If it fails before any work actually ran, everything spent on that attempt comes back. If part of the job had already run before it failed, that part stays charged and only the rest refunds. Either way, look for a "Refunded" row in your credit history for what came back.

Paid plans and top-ups

Two paid plans and a one-time top-up, all bought from the pricing page:

• Starter, $19 a month, 2,000 credits.
• Pro, $49 a month, 6,000 credits.
• Top-up, $10 for 1,000 credits, no subscription required.

Plan credits land at the start of your billing cycle and expire at the end of that cycle. Top-up credits don't expire, so buying one is a way to bank credits you're not ready to spend yet. Once you're on a paid plan, the daily drip stops, since the plan is already supplying the credits.

Upgrading takes effect immediately: you're charged the new plan's full price that day, get its full credit allotment right away, and a new monthly cycle starts from that day. For a plan change made on the web, whatever was left on your old plan carries over and stays usable through the new cycle instead of being lost. Downgrading or cancelling takes effect at the end of the current cycle, so you keep what you have until then.

The Chat Octopus app sells Starter and Pro through the App Store and Google Play, at $24.99 a month and $59.99 a month. Top-ups stay web-only; buy those from the pricing page instead.

If something looks wrong

A dispute or chargeback on a card payment follows a different process, covered in the terms. For a question about your own balance or a specific charge, your credit history in settings has the receipt; the assistant has no way to look your balance up when you ask, and only tells you the number when a job is blocked for lack of credits. For how the credit system works in general, whether daily credits lapse if you stop using it for a while, say, see how to ask the assistant and it can walk you through it.