> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://help.auray.ai/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://help.auray.ai/plans-and-credits.md).

# Plans and credits

One balance funds everything. A photo, a song, a clip, a 3D model, a reply in Messages and a running machine in Code all spend from the same credits — there is no separate allowance per app, because two allowances would mean whichever app you happened to open first in a month decided your balance for the rest of it.

Your balance sits in the menu bar, next to the search icon. Click it and Settings opens on your plan.

{% hint style="warning" %}
**Stripe is in test mode, so nothing is charged.** Checkout, upgrades and cancellation all genuinely work, and your plan really does change — but only Stripe's test cards are accepted, and a real card number is refused rather than billed. No money has moved on this deployment.
{% endhint %}

## The four plans

|                           | Free | Pro         | Max         | Ultimate     |
| ------------------------- | ---- | ----------- | ----------- | ------------ |
| Price                     | $0   | $20 / month | $60 / month | $120 / month |
| Credits each month        | none | 600         | 2,000       | 5,000        |
| What one credit costs you | —    | $0.033      | $0.030      | $0.024       |

Every price in the product is worked out against $0.024, which is Ultimate's rate and the cheapest on the ladder. So the same job costs the same number of credits on every plan, and on Pro and Max those credits cost you more in money. That is what the higher plans buy: the credits get cheaper, not the jobs.

### Free generates nothing

Free has no monthly credits, and that is the whole difference. Video, Photos, Music, 3D, Messages and Code are locked rather than throttled — there is no smaller quota, no watermark and no slower queue behind the lock.

Each of those apps checks your plan before it checks your balance, so what you see is "your plan does not include this" rather than "not enough credits". The second would be a true sentence about the wrong problem.

The other ten apps need no credits and are all there: Finder, Safari, Mail, Notes, Calendar, Terminal, TextEdit, Calculator, System Settings and About This Mac.

## Video

|               | Free | Pro       | Max       | Ultimate  |
| ------------- | ---- | --------- | --------- | --------- |
| Longest clip  | —    | 8 s       | 12 s      | 15 s      |
| Quality       | —    | fast, pro | fast, pro | fast, pro |
| 2K upscaling  | —    | —         | —         | —         |
| Clips at once | —    | 1         | 2         | 2         |

**There are two qualities, not three.** A third called standard was retired: it ran the same 50 steps at the same quality as pro but on slower hardware, so it took 3.2 times as long and charged you 14% more for identical output. Fast is a genuinely different thing rather than a slower one — 8 steps against 50, for about a quarter of the price.

**The clip length is per clip, and per scene.** A storyboard chains up to 16 scenes into as much as two minutes of finished video, and each scene is held to your plan's clip ceiling. Pro's 8 seconds is a limit on each scene, not on the film.

Short scenes are also cheaper than long ones for the same finished length, because render time grows faster than duration does. The same two minutes costs noticeably less as fifteen 8-second scenes than as eight 15-second ones.

**Fast cannot carry a face or a voice.** Reference images and a dialogue track need the 50-step model, and the one behind fast refuses a keyframe outright. A storyboard that anchors a character to a photograph has to be rendered at pro, and anchoring costs about 30% more per scene.

{% hint style="danger" %}
**2K upscaling is refused on every plan, Ultimate included.** The upscaling pass calls an outside service this deployment has no key for. Rather than show the toggle, charge you 5 credits per second of video, fail at submit and refund, it is switched off — so the row exists in the comparison table in Settings and reads "not included" in all four columns.
{% endhint %}

## Photos

|                       | Free | Pro | Max | Ultimate |
| --------------------- | ---- | --- | --- | -------- |
| Images per generation | —    | 2   | 4   | 4        |
| Largest resolution    | —    | 1K  | 2K  | 2K       |
| Images at once        | —    | 1   | 3   | 3        |

The nine styles are the same on every paid plan. Resolution and count are what the plan moves.

## Music

|               | Free | Pro   | Max   | Ultimate |
| ------------- | ---- | ----- | ----- | -------- |
| Longest song  | —    | 1 min | 3 min | 5 min    |
| Vocals        | —    | yes   | yes   | yes      |
| Songs at once | —    | 1     | 2     | 3        |

**Vocals come with Pro rather than being held back for a higher plan.** An instrumental and a sung track cost exactly the same to render, and charging more for one of them would have no basis. Leave the lyrics empty and the song comes back instrumental.

The length you ask for is a target rather than a promise — the model stops when a song feels finished. If it comes back shorter than you asked, the difference is refunded.

## 3D

|                | Free | Pro    | Max    | Ultimate |
| -------------- | ---- | ------ | ------ | -------- |
| Tiers unlocked | —    | 2 of 5 | 3 of 5 | 5 of 5   |
| Models at once | —    | 1      | 2      | 3        |

* **Pro** gets geometry and textured.
* **Max** adds rigged.
* **Ultimate** adds controlled-object and controlled-character, the two tiers you can steer. Controlled-object takes a bounding box; controlled-character takes a bounding box or a pose, because a pose only earns its keep on a tier that goes on to build a skeleton.

Rigged is held back from Pro not to create an upsell but because it is the tier most likely to fail on the wrong input — the rigger dies on furniture — and your first 3D job should not be the one that teaches you that.

{% hint style="warning" %}
**3D cannot be generated in the 27 EU member states, the United Kingdom or South Korea.** That is the model's licence rather than our price list, so it applies on every plan, Ultimate included. You declare your country in Settings; it is an answer you give about yourself, not a lookup of where you are.
{% endhint %}

## Messages

|                              | Free | Pro   | Max   | Ultimate |
| ---------------------------- | ---- | ----- | ----- | -------- |
| Conversation kept in context | —    | 24 KB | 64 KB | 160 KB   |

When a conversation grows past that, the oldest turns are dropped and the newest kept. The longest single reply ladders too: 4,096 tokens on Pro, 8,192 on Max, 16,384 on Ultimate.

## Code

|          | Free | Pro | Max | Ultimate |
| -------- | ---- | --- | --- | -------- |
| Projects | —    | 5   | 20  | 50       |

Machine time is 3 credits per five minutes, which is 36 credits an hour. Spent on nothing else, Pro's 600 credits are about 17 hours of machine, Max's 2,000 about 56, and Ultimate's 5,000 about 139.

Time is bought five minutes at a time while the browser is open, so a machine you stop after ten minutes cost you six credits whatever session length you picked. The length you choose only caps what can be spent before it stops on its own.

## How many things can run at once

Two ceilings, and only one of them is yours.

Your plan sets how many of your own jobs may run:

|        | Free | Pro | Max | Ultimate |
| ------ | ---- | --- | --- | -------- |
| Photos | —    | 1   | 3   | 3        |
| Music  | —    | 1   | 2   | 3        |
| 3D     | —    | 1   | 2   | 3        |
| Video  | —    | 1   | 2   | 2        |

Max is deliberately uneven — three images at once but two songs and two models — because an image is seconds of GPU and the other two are minutes.

The second ceiling belongs to the platform. There are only so many GPUs, and a share of each product's capacity is held back from the desktop so that nothing can take the whole product offline:

| Product | Running at once, across everyone on the desktop |
| ------- | ----------------------------------------------- |
| Music   | 9                                               |
| Video   | 7                                               |
| Photos  | 5                                               |
| 3D      | 3                                               |

3D is the scarce one: four machines exist for it across the whole platform, and one of the four is kept back. When the other three are busy you are told the service is at capacity rather than being put in a queue that never visibly moves. Ultimate does not exempt you from that — it is a hardware ceiling rather than a plan limit.

The seat held back from each product is reserved for the API, so that a script can never take a product offline for the people using it by hand. The API is switched off today, so those seats currently sit idle. That is the cost of a reservation that will be right the day it is turned on.

## What things cost

| Thing                         | Credits |
| ----------------------------- | ------- |
| One 1K image                  | 4       |
| Four 1K images                | 7       |
| One 2K image                  | 8       |
| Four 2K images                | 23      |
| 30-second song                | 10      |
| One-minute song               | 17      |
| Three-minute song             | 47      |
| Five-minute song              | 77      |
| 8-second clip, fast           | 16      |
| 8-second clip, pro            | 63      |
| 15-second clip, fast          | 42      |
| 15-second clip, pro           | 172     |
| 3D geometry                   | 5       |
| 3D textured                   | 11      |
| 3D rigged                     | 14      |
| 3D controlled-object          | 17      |
| 3D controlled-character       | 20      |
| An hour of Code machine       | 36      |
| 1,000 characters of narration | 20      |

Images and songs carry a small flat fee on top of the rate — 3 credits per image job, 2 per song — because a job that starts a cold machine pays for loading it however small the job is.

The longest clip your plan allows, at pro quality, is 63 credits on Pro, 122 on Max and 172 on Ultimate. Storyboards are priced scene by scene and cost more than the scenes add up to, because chaining and assembly are real work on top of the renders.

Messages is the one that cannot be quoted in advance. It costs at least 1 credit a turn and then depends on how much the model reads and writes, so the app holds back the worst case and gives the difference back when the reply finishes. That is why your balance dips and then comes part of the way back.

## When credits come back

* **A generation that fails outright returns everything.** No files, no charge.
* **A 3D job that fails part-way keeps the stages that finished** — a rigged job that dies at the rigging step still leaves you a finished textured mesh, and it stays in your library.
* **A photo job where the filter withheld images refunds those images.** The 3-credit job fee stays, because the machine did run, and a fully refunded refusal would make abusive attempts free.
* **A song shorter than you asked for refunds the difference.**
* **Stopping a song before it starts returns all of it.** Nothing is written until the very end, so an early stop produced nothing. Stopping mid-render keeps the job fee and the fraction already burned.
* **Stopping a single clip returns all of it. Stopping a storyboard returns every scene not yet rendered** — the app tells you that number before you click.

## When credits arrive, and how many can pile up

{% hint style="info" %}
A month's credits arrive the first time you open one of these apps during that month, rather than at a fixed moment. There is no billing clock running in the background — the grant is made by the app you opened. A month you never open one in is a month with no grant in it, and opening one in the next month grants that next month rather than the one you missed.
{% endhint %}

Unspent credits stay in your balance up to three months' worth of your own plan: 1,800 on Pro, 6,000 on Max, 15,000 on Ultimate. Above that the next grant is skipped rather than trimmed — nothing you already hold is ever taken away, including when you move down a plan.

A grant blocked by that ceiling is not lost for the month either. Spend back under it before the month ends and the grant lands then.

## The trial

Seven days of Ultimate, once per customer, with a card taken up front. It is an ordinary Ultimate subscription that Stripe opens in a trial state, which is why the credits are the ordinary 5,000 rather than a special number — a trial that handed out twenty times the real allowance would teach the wrong thing, and day eight would feel like a fault rather than a bill.

While the trial runs, the date on your plan is the day the card would first be charged rather than a renewal date. In test mode, it is a day nothing is charged on.

## Changing your plan

{% stepper %}
{% step %}

### Open the plan

Click the credit count in the menu bar, or open System Settings and choose Subscription.
{% endstep %}

{% step %}

### Pick a plan

Higher plans say Upgrade; lower ones say Switch to this. Either opens Stripe checkout.
{% endstep %}

{% step %}

### Check out

Only Stripe's test cards are accepted here. A real card number is refused rather than charged.
{% endstep %}

{% step %}

### Change your mind through Manage billing

That opens Stripe's own portal. Cancelling there runs your plan to the end of the period you have already paid for — your card in Settings then shows the date it ends instead of the date it renews.
{% endstep %}
{% endstepper %}

Limits apply the moment the plan does. A downgrade takes effect on the server as well as in the interface, so a setting you chose on a bigger plan is refused rather than quietly honoured.

## What is out of date in the app

The four plan cards in System Settings still describe things the product no longer does. The Pro card offers "fast and standard quality" when standard was retired, and the Max card offers 2K upscaling when it is off on every plan.

The comparison table underneath those cards is built from the same code that enforces the limits, so where the two disagree, the table is right and the cards are stale.

## API keys

Settings has an API Keys pane, and your plan sets how many live keys you may hold: two on Free, twenty-five on any paid plan.

The API itself is switched off on this deployment. Every call is refused before your key is even looked at, so a key made today cannot generate anything on any plan — and a Free key could not generate even if it were switched on, because there are no monthly credits behind it to spend.


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