Getting started

Credits & questions

Credits are the fuel for work Ounie does for you — running apps, above all. Asking your own brains is metered separately and never touches them. Knowing which meter applies makes a plan easy to reason about.

Credits pay for

App runs

And for

Making a brain better

Never for

Asking your own brains

One wallet

Every app

Credits run the apps#

This is the main event. Every app in the fleet draws from one wallet — there are no per-app plans, no per-app balances, and nothing to top up twice. A battlecard, a scraped lead list, a rendered video and a podcast episode all bill the same balance, and every charge is tagged in your ledger with the app and the action that spent it, so a month’s usage reads as a list of things you actually got.

Each action has exactly one price. Listing apps and reading their tool contracts is free — an agent can survey the whole fleet before spending anything. See Apps for how a run is invoked and priced.

And they make a brain better#

A brain is what turns a generic app result into one that argues from your material. So the second thing credits buy is the work that improves a brain rather than merely holding it:

  • Auto-Research ingests beyond your plan’s monthly allowance — 3 credits each, charged only when you approve a find.
  • Feed cards your brain curates for itself — 3 credits per card returned. Swiping is free.
  • Design passes and generated imagery for a published site, and the larger model and media jobs some apps offer.
  • Widget questions beyond your plan’s included bundle — half a credit each. Visitors asking your widget spend credits, never your own question quota.
  • Answers bought from someone else’s paid brain in the marketplace.

Feeding a brain is always free

Adding sources, notes, links and captures never costs credits, on any plan, at any volume. Nor does editing the wiki, publishing or restyling a site, swiping the feed, or filing an output into a brain’s asset library. You are only ever charged when Ounie generates something.

Questions are a separate meter#

Asking your own brains is a plan quota, not a credit cost — and it covers asking from anywhere: the web app, the iOS app, a connector, MCP, or the REST API all draw the same pool. Paid plans get a monthly allowance on a rolling 30-day window; Free draws a one-time bank of 1,000 questions that never expires. An agent asking on your behalf spends that quota exactly as you would. Current figures are on pricing.

One wallet, three pools#

Your balance is made of three pools, and a run drains them in a fixed order so the expiring money is always spent first:

INCLUDEDresets monthly1PURCHASEDnever expires2EARNEDcashable3DRAINED IN THAT ORDER

Included#

Your subscription’s monthly allowance. It resets on the 1st (UTC) and does not roll over — on Studio and Team you choose its size when you pick your credit rung, and you can change that anytime, prorated.

Purchased#

Credit packs. They never expire, they work on every plan including Free, and they exist for the month that runs long rather than as the way to pay for a normal one.

Earned#

What sellers accumulate when someone pays for answers from their public brain. Earned credits spend exactly like the others and are the cashable kind.

How a charge works#

Charging is server-side and atomic: a run reserves its price before it starts, then settles what it used — or refunds the reservation in full. Your wallet is a hard ceiling, so a run that would overdraw it is refused with a top-up link rather than being half-done.

RESERVERUNSETTLEREFUNDthin result → refund

Thin results cost nothing

An empty dataset, a failed render, or an honest “not in your brain” refunds automatically. It is a property of the meter, not a refund you have to ask for — and it holds on the pay-per-call rail too, where a thin result settles zero on chain.

What a credit is worth#

A credit’s face value is one cent. What you pay for one depends on how it arrived: subscription credits come with a plan at a flat rate per credit, and pack credits cost a little more for the convenience of buying them one at a time. Both spend identically. Live rates, pack sizes and rung prices are on pricing, and your balance and full ledger live in usage settings.

The other way to pay#

Credits are the rail for accounts. An autonomous agent with a wallet can skip the account entirely and pay per call in USDC over x402 — anonymous per-call prices sit above the member rate, which is what an account is for. See agent payments and funding a wallet.