Credits, explained

Every AI product you've used recently sells the same currency: credits. Buy a bundle, spend it as you go, top it up when it runs low. The pattern isn't fashion — it solves a genuinely hard problem that pure subscriptions and pure pay-as-you-go each fail at.

What credits are

Credits are prepaid usage: the customer pays first, receives a balance, and consumption draws that balance down. Every usage event — a generation, an API call, a delivery — debits the wallet at whatever rate your pricing sets.

The model sits deliberately between two extremes. A flat subscription makes heavy users unprofitable and light users overcharged. Raw pay-as-you-go produces the bill nobody can predict — the one that makes a CFO ban the tool. Credits give both sides what they need: the customer chooses their exposure in advance, and you get the cash before the cost.

The mechanics that make it work

Four pieces turn "prepaid balance" into a billing model:

The wallet — a balance per customer, with an auditable history of every top-up and every debit. When a customer disputes a number, the transaction list is the answer.
Top-ups — manual when the customer chooses, or automatic below a threshold: when the balance drops under 500, refill 5,000. Auto top-up is the difference between a growing customer and a 2am outage followed by an angry email.
Grants — credits given rather than bought: a signup bonus, a monthly allowance included with a plan, a make-good after an incident. Same wallet, different origin — and worth tracking separately, because granted credits are marketing spend, not revenue.
Expiry — whether unused credits live forever. Expiry protects you from unbounded liability sitting on your books; generosity protects the customer relationship. Whatever you choose, it's a policy the customer sees before buying, not a surprise after.

There's an accounting truth hiding in here: credit purchases are not revenue yet. They're a liability — deferred revenue — that converts to income as credits are consumed. Businesses that treat wallet top-ups as instant revenue eventually meet an accountant, and the meeting goes badly.

What this looks like in Tirdad

In Tirdad, the credit system is built in, not bolted on:

Wallets per customer — with balances, full transaction history, and multi-wallet support when one customer needs separate credit pools.
Auto top-up rules — threshold and refill amount, configured per wallet, executed automatically.
Credit grants attach to plans — a monthly included allowance lands in the wallet at each renewal, on its own terms.
Metering does the spending — usage events debit the wallet at your configured rates, in real time, visibly.

The customer sees a balance they control; you see cash up front and a liability that retires itself with every event.

This is billing, explained · 07 — one billing concept a week, in plain language. Previously: grace periods. Next up: the usage event — the atom all of this is built on.

Ready to sell credits like the AI products do? Start free at tirdad.ai.