Hi - I’m after a bit of perspectives from the community on how to keep track of things when we sell ‘credits’ to user but the cost of the platform use through the API key is per millions of text tokens.
What got me thinking about this is that I have a tool which is based on a form where the user uploads some information, etc then press submit and the Ai does a big job and outputs a document for them, great - as we only made it do one action it takes one credit to run it. Then I said thankyou to the Ai and it charged one more credit - so from my users perspective they used one credit for a big specialised complicated action and then one more credit for a generic you’re welcome message. Obviously then my cost through the API key is far from equal for generating the big output than the you’re welcome message.
Another thing I’m trying to rationalise from the users perspectives is that within my studio, I will have some tools which are form based as described above - you can get a specialised output for 1 credit, but other tools which are chat based - a short conversation with the Ai before generating an output would be considerably more ‘expensive’ to use in terms of credit maybe 10+ credits to have the short conversation to get to a similar output type but the cost to user is 10 fold.
So I think this scenario is confusing for the user and also for me the owner as 10 credits spent by users can have a huge variance in my bill coming through the API key. Have others noticed this kind of difference and how have you dealt with it in terms of pricing and communication to users? Thanks!
Yes, you have hit the nail on the head here. A 50,000 token operation costs 1 credit. A 5 credit operation costs 1 credits. That’s how it works for the sake of simplicity. Token costs are very difficult for average users to grasp (coming from someone who explains it daily to users).
A common way around this is to sell infinite credits for a high price. Then the end-user does not even need to think about credits or numbers of uses.
You might find this video interesting which talks at length about using your own API Key vs Credits.
Thanks, yes a high price for infinite credits is sort of the conclusion I was coming to. It seems most Ai products in the market are sold with unlimited use. I think explaining the concept of credits either way and selling based on that just seems limiting and would put off potential sales.
I’m a little concerned however with the infinite credits feature that somebody would go crazy with it and run up a huge bill - or share the login credentials widely and really run up a big bill on my API. Is there any experience of this kind of thing or measures to prevent it? Thanks!