What AI credits actually mean, vendor by vendor

Almost every AI free tier is denominated in something called a credit, and almost no two vendors mean the same thing by it. A credit is a private currency with its own exchange rate, its own expiry and its own rules about what it can be spent on. This note walks through the credit systems documented in the reviews on this site, all checked October 7, 2026, so that a number like '150 a day' or '125 one time' means something before you sign up.

A credit is a private currency

Credits exist to let a vendor price many different operations on one meter. An image, an upscale, a ten-second video and a minute of transcription cost different amounts to produce, and a credit lets each be charged at its own rate while the customer sees one balance. The consequence is that the number of credits on a plan tells you nothing until you know the rate card, and the rate card is where vendors differ most. Some publish it in full. Some publish one example. Some refer you to a cost display inside the app.

Leonardo.Ai: tokens with a published price list

Leonardo.Ai is the clearest case in this batch because the help centre publishes a cost table. A default 768x768 image is 1 token; four of them are 4. Background removal is 2 tokens per image. An upscale is 5. The premium processing modes are where the budget goes: Alchemy at 8 tokens per image with prompt magic off and 16 with it on, Alchemy V2 on Lightning XL models at 10, and full 3D texture generation at 30. Using several reference images adds cost; the article gives 7 tokens for a four-reference example. The help centre also notes that the cost appears on the generate button before you commit, which is the number to trust over anything written here.

The free plan gets 150 fast tokens a day, resetting every 24 hours, and tokens that go unused expire rather than carrying over. In the documented arithmetic, that is up to 150 plain images a day or around nine heavier Alchemy images, at the Basic quality setting that the pricing page lists for Free. Paid plans change the economics with a Token Bank that stores unused tokens for up to three months; the bank capacities on the pricing page are exactly three times the monthly allowance. Essential at $12 a month gets 8,500 tokens and a 25,500 bank. Free users have no bank and no top-ups.

Runway: credits per second of video

Runway publishes the rate for its flagship model and lets you do the rest. Per the help centre, Gen-4.5 uses 12 credits per second of generated video, so a five-second clip is 60 credits and a ten-second clip is 120. The free plan is a one-time deposit of 125 credits that never expires, with no credit purchases available to free users. That is two five-second clips, or one ten-second clip, from the free deposit, with the caveat that the pricing page says Free gets a selection of models and does not list which.

A one-time deposit of 125 credits is included with the Free plan and does not expire.

That line is from Runway's help centre article on credits, checked October 7, 2026, and it is the whole of the free economics. The paid Standard plan, $15 a month or $12 billed annually, gets 625 credits, and the pricing page translates that into roughly 52 seconds of Gen-4.5, or 125 seconds of Gen-4 Turbo, or 78 Gen-4 images at 1080p. The second figure implies the Turbo model costs about 5 credits a second, less than half the flagship rate, which is why on this product the model you choose matters as much as the tier. Standard, Pro and Unlimited credits expire on the billing date; only Max and Team roll one month forward.

Ideogram: credits by the week, bought by the cent

Ideogram's free plan is 30 credits a week, but only for accounts that sign in with Google, Apple or Microsoft; the documentation says email-and-password accounts get none. The plans page does not publish a per-operation cost. It sends users to a Usage costs view inside Settings, so this site will not convert 30 credits into a number of images; the FAQ's note that reference images and edits always require credits is the only hint that basic generation is the cheap operation.

What Ideogram does publish is the price of more. Extra credits cost one US cent each, in preset amounts of $10, $20, $50 or $100 or any amount from $1 to $300, and they expire 365 days after purchase. Purchased credits are spent only after monthly plan credits are gone and survive a cancelled subscription. Plus, at $20 a month or $15 annually, gets 2,400 credits a month plus a slower queue with no limit after the credits run out. Monthly credits do not roll over, and the documentation states that refunds are not offered.

Suno: daily credits, and a second meter for downloads

Suno gives free users 50 credits a day, replenished once daily on UTC per the help centre, which states that 50 credits is enough for 10 songs. That implies roughly 5 credits a song, but the article was last edited well before this review and the pricing page publishes no per-song cost, so treat the figure as indicative and watch the balance on the first day. Credits do not carry over from day to day or month to month.

The unusual part is that Suno meters downloads separately from credits. The free plan has no monthly song downloads at all. Pro, at $8 a month, includes 2,500 credits and 20 downloads a month; Premier, at $24, includes 10,000 credits and 60 downloads. The terms of service connect this to the licence: a paid user may commercially exploit output provided they have obtained a permitted download of it. In other words, on Suno the download is the licence token, and a Pro subscriber can generate hundreds of songs and legally use twenty. The help centre adds that paid users who exhaust their monthly allotment drop to the same 50-credit daily rhythm as free users until renewal.

Canva: one pool, three tool tiers, and an estimate

Canva does not call its unit a credit. It calls it a shared monthly AI allowance, and the FAQ sorts its AI tools into Standard, Premium and Ultra tiers that draw on the same pool at different rates. The free estimate is up to 20 uses of Standard or Premium tools a month, with no access to Ultra tools. Canva Pro gets up to 200 Premium uses or 20 Ultra uses; Business and Enterprise get 400 or 40.

Two qualifiers matter more than the number. The pricing page says the estimate assumes simple tasks with one kind of tool, and that mixing tools or doing complex tasks may reduce your total to the lower end of the range. So 20 is a ceiling, and the floor is not published. And which specific tool sits in which tier is referred to the Help Centre rather than listed on the pricing page, which this site could not retrieve. A free user who generates an image, edits it and resizes the design has spent three actions from one pool, possibly at three rates. There is no documented way to buy more AI on Free; AI Pass and top-ups require a paid plan.

The rest of the batch, briefly

• ElevenLabs: 10,000 credits a month on Free; one character equals one credit on V2 multilingual text to speech, so roughly 10,000 characters of narration. Outside narration the rates jump: 330 credits a minute for speech to text, 900 for music, per the pricing FAQ. Identical regenerations are free up to two times. Paid credits roll over up to two months; free credits do not.
• Gamma: 400 credits at signup, one time, and the help centre says free credits do not refresh. Cost per action varies by model, length and complexity; the vendor does not publish a fixed figure, but says credits are not charged for AI errors or clarification requests and that image costs are shown before generating.
• Descript: 100 AI credits one time on Free, alongside a separate meter of 60 media minutes a month. The help centre says Studio Sound has a maximum cost of 30 credits per file and that Underlord's cost is non-deterministic. Credits do not roll over on any plan.
• Adobe Firefly: free daily generations with no published count. On the paid Standard plan at $9.99 a month, 2,000 credits a month buy premium features only; the plans page gives the example of up to 20 five-second videos, while standard image features like Generative Fill are unlimited. Credits reset monthly and do not roll over.
• Fireflies.ai: two currencies. A small grant of transcription credits at signup, bypassed entirely when calendar auto-join is on, and 20 AI credits for AI Skills and the assistant, which the billing page describes as one-time.

Why no cross-vendor comparison works

Put the numbers side by side and the temptation is to rank them. The ranking is meaningless, for five reasons that stack. The unit differs: one Leonardo token is a cheap image, one Runway credit is a twelfth of a second of video. The rate differs by model and mode inside the same product: 1 token or 16 for a Leonardo image, 12 or about 5 credits a second on Runway. The rhythm differs: a daily reset, a weekly one, a monthly pool or a single deposit. The expiry differs: Runway's free credits never expire, Leonardo's die at midnight, Ideogram's purchased ones last a year. And purchasability differs: Ideogram sells credits to anyone at a cent each, Runway and Leonardo sell none to free users, Canva sells none without a paid plan.

The only comparison that holds is between a credit system and your own workload. The question is never which vendor gives the most credits; it is how many of your actual jobs the free allowance covers, at the quality setting and model you would actually use.

How to do the arithmetic yourself

• Find the rate card: a help-centre table, a pricing-page example, or a cost display in the app. If it is only in the app, the first generation is a measurement.
• Price your real job in credits, at the model and settings you would ship, not the cheapest ones.
• Divide the allowance by that cost, then apply the rhythm: per day, per week, per month, or once.
• Check what happens at zero: wait for a reset, a slower queue, a top-up purchase, or a hard stop. Runway and Leonardo stop free users; Ideogram sells cents; Suno comes back tomorrow.
• Check whether the paid tier changes the kind of thing you get, not just the count: privacy on Ideogram and Leonardo, a licence on Suno and ElevenLabs, no watermark on Runway.
• Date your numbers. Everything above is as of October 2026 and the rate cards change with every model release.

Bottom line

A credit is a vendor's unit, not an industry's. Leonardo publishes a full price list and gives the most generous daily budget in this batch; Runway publishes one rate and a single deposit that does not expire; Ideogram publishes the cost of buying more but not the cost of using what you have; Suno meters the song and then meters the download; Canva publishes an estimate with its own footnote saying you will probably get less. None of those can be ranked against each other. What can be done is to price one real task in each currency and see which free tier covers it. How this site grades a free tier explains how that feeds the value score, and the method page explains why the numbers here carry a date.