[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-why-we-price-ai-in-euros-not-credits":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"author":6,"body":7,"date":256,"description":257,"extension":258,"image":259,"meta":260,"navigation":261,"path":262,"seo":263,"stem":264,"tags":265,"__hash__":271},"blog\u002Fblog\u002Fwhy-we-price-ai-in-euros-not-credits.md","How much does one credit cost? Why we price AI work in euros","Peter",{"type":8,"value":9,"toc":246},"minimark",[10,14,17,20,33,36,41,44,50,56,62,68,72,75,103,107,114,117,124,127,130,134,137,188,191,201,207,213,216,220,227,230,234,237,240,243],[11,12,13],"p",{},"How much does one credit cost?",[11,15,16],{},"I recently compared three AI e-learning tools, and got three answers: $1 buys 50 credits. $50 buys 20 credits. $13 buys 2,500 credits.",[11,18,19],{},"You can't compare those — and that's the point. A credit isn't a unit of anything. It doesn't measure tokens, or minutes, or images, or effort. It's whatever each vendor decides it is, and each vendor decides differently.",[11,21,22,23,27,28,32],{},"Then comes the second layer. Once you've decoded what a credit costs, you still don't know what anything ",[24,25,26],"em",{},"costs in credits",". One course might consume 5 credits or 150, depending on how many lessons it has, whether it generates images, whether there's a video. So the two numbers you'd need to answer the only question that matters — ",[29,30,31],"strong",{},"what will this course cost me?"," — are both unknowns, and they multiply.",[11,34,35],{},"That's not an accident of sloppy pricing pages. It's the design.",[37,38,40],"h2",{"id":39},"why-vendors-like-credits","Why vendors like credits",[11,42,43],{},"Let me steelman the credit system properly, because we used one too.",[11,45,46,49],{},[29,47,48],{},"Model prices move."," The cost of a state-of-the-art model call has changed dramatically — in both directions — over the past two years. A new model ships, it's better and cheaper; a provider repriced; you switch image generators. If your public price is \"€0.08 per image,\" every one of those moves either eats your margin or forces a visible price change. If your public price is \"8 credits,\" you can quietly re-map credits to costs and never touch the pricing page. Credits are a currency you control, pegged to nothing.",[11,51,52,55],{},[29,53,54],{},"Decoupling feels better."," Spending 40 credits doesn't activate the same part of the brain as spending €2.30. Game designers have known this forever — arcade tokens, in-app gems, casino chips. Once money becomes points, people stop doing arithmetic.",[11,57,58,61],{},[29,59,60],{},"Breakage is profit."," Credits expire, plans reset monthly, unused balances evaporate. The gap between credits sold and credits redeemed is quietly one of the best margins in software.",[11,63,64,65],{},"The first reason is legitimate engineering economics. The other two are the vendor's gain purchased with the customer's clarity. And all three share one property: ",[29,66,67],{},"they move the uncertainty from the vendor's spreadsheet to the customer's.",[37,69,71],{"id":70},"what-that-uncertainty-costs-the-buyer","What that uncertainty costs the buyer",[11,73,74],{},"If you're an individual tinkering on a free plan, credit opacity is a mild annoyance. If you're an L&D manager or a consultant, it's a real problem:",[76,77,78,85,91,97],"ul",{},[79,80,81,84],"li",{},[29,82,83],{},"You can't budget."," \"How much will our compliance refresh cost to build?\" deserves a number, not \"it depends on credit consumption.\"",[79,86,87,90],{},[29,88,89],{},"You can't compare tools."," Fifty credits per dollar versus 2,500 credits per thirteen dollars is not a comparison, it's a riddle.",[79,92,93,96],{},[29,94,95],{},"You can't invoice confidently."," Consultants building courses for clients need to pass costs through. \"Approximately some credits\" doesn't survive contact with a client's procurement team.",[79,98,99,102],{},[29,100,101],{},"You learn the real price only after spending it."," The first accurate data point about what a course costs arrives when the credits are already gone.",[37,104,106],{"id":105},"our-own-credit-system-and-what-we-watched-happen","Our own credit system, and what we watched happen",[11,108,109,110,113],{},"LearnBuilder started with credits like everyone else, and for the textbook reason: our underlying costs ",[24,111,112],{},"do"," move. We sit on top of language models, image generators, video generators and speech synthesis, from multiple providers, and their prices change more often than anyone would like.",[11,115,116],{},"Two things made us tear it out anyway.",[11,118,119,120,123],{},"First, we watched authors get surprised. Someone would generate a full course — outline, ten lessons, thirty images — and only afterwards discover what it had consumed. Nothing was mispriced; everything was ",[24,121,122],{},"unknowable in advance",". The most common pricing question we got wasn't \"is this expensive?\" but \"what is this going to cost me?\" — asked before pressing the button, by people who had already paid us money and still couldn't answer it.",[11,125,126],{},"Second, we noticed we were maintaining a conversion table whose only function was to stand between our customers and a number we already knew. Internally, every AI action always had a real cost in euros. The credit was just a costume it wore in public.",[11,128,129],{},"So we removed the costume.",[37,131,133],{"id":132},"what-pricing-in-euros-actually-looks-like","What pricing in euros actually looks like",[11,135,136],{},"Today every AI action in LearnBuilder has a published price in euro cents, and that stated price is exactly what lands on your ledger:",[76,138,139,145,151,157,163,169,174,181],{},[79,140,141,142],{},"Creating or regenerating a block: ",[29,143,144],{},"€0.03",[79,146,147,148],{},"Improving a text: ",[29,149,150],{},"€0.02",[79,152,153,154],{},"Generating an image: ",[29,155,156],{},"€0.08",[79,158,159,160],{},"Generating a lesson's text content: ",[29,161,162],{},"€0.15",[79,164,165,166],{},"A course outline: ",[29,167,168],{},"€0.25",[79,170,171,172],{},"An interactive slideshow: ",[29,173,168],{},[79,175,176,177,180],{},"Video: ",[29,178,179],{},"€0.10 per second"," of produced footage",[79,182,183,184,187],{},"Audio narration: ",[29,185,186],{},"€0.12 per 1,000 characters"," (roughly a minute of speech)",[11,189,190],{},"Three product decisions sit behind that list, and they matter more than the numbers themselves:",[11,192,193,196,197,200],{},[29,194,195],{},"The stated price is the charged price."," We seeded each price from real ledger averages and rounded ",[24,198,199],{},"up"," to a friendly value, so the actual provider cost stays at or below what we state. When a model gets cheaper, our margin breathes; when one gets pricier, we absorb it until we update the list. The volatility is our problem now. That's the entire trade.",[11,202,203,206],{},[29,204,205],{},"You see the price before, during and after."," The course wizard shows a euro estimate on the create button before you commit — and a \"set up course only\" path that costs nothing, so you can build the structure first and generate content when you're ready. Every generation shows a receipt when it finishes (\"AI cost: €0.03\"). And every course has an AI-costs page where the receipts add up, per lesson, so \"what did this course cost to build?\" is a page you open, not a reconstruction exercise.",[11,208,209,212],{},[29,210,211],{},"Learner-time stays honest too."," Interactions that happen while learners use a course — quiz grading, AI dialogue turns, tutor questions — are metered at their actual cost, typically around a cent each, and forecast at publish time so you know what a running course costs before you enroll anyone.",[11,214,215],{},"Is your balance still prepaid? Yes — you top up in euros and spend in euros. A prepaid balance isn't the problem with credits. The made-up unit is.",[37,217,219],{"id":218},"the-trade-offs-honestly","The trade-offs, honestly",[11,221,222,223,226],{},"Euro pricing isn't free for us. We carry the model-price risk that credits would have exported to you. We occasionally have to update a price on a public list, visibly, instead of silently re-mapping a conversion. And there's a psychological cost to showing small numbers: some vendors would rather you not think about the fact that a generated image costs eight cents, because visible smallness invites the question of what ",[24,224,225],{},"their"," markup is.",[11,228,229],{},"We think that question is fair. I'd rather explain one number than a conversion table.",[37,231,233],{"id":232},"the-only-credit-system-that-would-work","The only credit system that would work",[11,235,236],{},"When I asked on LinkedIn whether anyone had seen a credit system that actually made budgeting easier, the honest answer I could construct is: yes — one where credits are pegged 1:1 to a currency, every action has a published credit price, you see an estimate before you spend and a receipt after.",[11,238,239],{},"But look at that system for a second. A unit pegged to money, with visible prices, estimates and receipts — that's just money, wearing a badge that says \"credit.\" Every property that makes it budgetable is a property of currency pricing. The only thing the credit layer adds back is the vendor's option to quietly change the peg later.",[11,241,242],{},"So we skipped the badge. A block costs three cents. An image costs eight. Your course's build cost is a number on a page, in a currency your finance team already understands.",[11,244,245],{},"That's the whole feature.",{"title":247,"searchDepth":248,"depth":248,"links":249},"",2,[250,251,252,253,254,255],{"id":39,"depth":248,"text":40},{"id":70,"depth":248,"text":71},{"id":105,"depth":248,"text":106},{"id":132,"depth":248,"text":133},{"id":218,"depth":248,"text":219},{"id":232,"depth":248,"text":233},"2026-08-10","Three AI e-learning tools, three answers: $1 buys 50 credits, $50 buys 20, $13 buys 2,500. Credits are an abstraction layer that hands pricing uncertainty to the customer — here's why we tore ours out and put real euro prices on every AI action instead.","md","\u002Fblog\u002Fwhy-we-price-ai-in-euros-not-credits.webp",{},true,"\u002Fblog\u002Fwhy-we-price-ai-in-euros-not-credits",{"title":5,"description":257},"blog\u002Fwhy-we-price-ai-in-euros-not-credits",[266,267,268,269,270],"pricing","AI","transparency","credits","LearnBuilder","zL-RX7QYDP1AaDeh1o8Ge1PUAocKSrTtL9GyLMtiik0"]