Getting started

Credits & questions

Ounie has two separate meters. Your daily questions cover asking your own brains; credits cover everything else. Knowing which is which makes your plan easy to reason about.

Daily questions#

Every plan includes a number of questions you can ask your own brains each day. This is your personal allowance: it resets daily, it is included in the plan, and it covers asking from anywhere — the web app, the iOS app, a connector, or the REST API all draw from the same pool. When you hit the limit, it comes back the next day.

Credits#

Credits are a prepaid balance — a wallet, not a daily reset. They pay for the things that go beyond asking your own brains: questions from a public widget on your site, buying answers from someone else’s paid brain in the marketplace, approving Auto-Research finds. You top up with credit packs on any plan, and they sit in your wallet until you spend them.

Which meter applies#

The rule of thumb: asking your brains uses daily questions; anything that costs real money on someone’s behalf uses credits. So a visitor asking your widget spends your credits, not your daily questions — public traffic never eats into your personal allowance. A brain owner can also set a per-brain cap so one widget or listing can’t drain the wallet on its own.

Credits are the universal currency. The same wallet that pays for widget questions and marketplace answers is the one sellers earn into when their brain is paid for — and earned credits can be cashed out.

Buying and earning#

There are two ways credits enter your wallet: you buy them in packs, or you earn them by selling answers from a public brain. Purchased credits are spend-only; earned credits are the cashable kind. Either way they spend the same. See pricing for current daily limits, pack sizes, and rates.