Credits, and how you buy them

Credits are what you pay with when you have ClickWhale generate a website for you with AI. That is the only thing credits are used for. Everything else about your account is billed by subscription and invoice.

Credits belong to you, not to a website. There is one balance for your whole account, and you can spend it on any website you generate. They live on your profile rather than on a website's page, and a credit purchase is invoiced to you personally.

What a generation costs

The Credits block shows your balance and, next to it, what a generation costs: a generated website costs 3 credits. The generation form shows the same number again, next to your balance, before you commit to anything.

The first generation on a new account is free. Until you've used it, the generation form doesn't mention credits at all. See Having AI build your website.

Credits have no expiry date. What you don't spend stays in your account.

Buying a pack

Three packs are on offer, and the bigger the pack the cheaper the credit:

Clicking a pack opens a checkout with two steps.

1. Chosen product: the pack, its price and the per-credit rate, so you can still change your mind by going back.

2. Billing details: if you've bought from us before, pick one of your existing sets of details and you're done. Otherwise fill them in: first and last name, an e-mail address for the invoice, and a complete address including the country. All three are required, and the country decides the VAT treatment.

Continue to payment hands you over to the payment provider. When you come back, the portal tells you what actually happened: Thank you! N credits have been added to your account. You now have M.

Topping up in the middle of a generation

If you fill in the generation form and don't have enough credits, nothing is lost. The form's button says Pay and generate AI website rather than Generate, and pressing it does three things:

1. Your request is saved first, exactly as you wrote it.
2. You're offered exactly the shortfall: Buy 3 more credits to continue, at €1.00 per credit.
3. Paying releases the waiting generation straight away. The message says so: your credits have been used to generate your website, rather than added to a balance.

If you close that page instead, the request stays on your AI Websites list with the status Payment needed and a Pay now button. Pick it up whenever you like.

That also works the other way round: if you bought a pack from your profile in the meantime, press Pay now on the waiting request and it simply starts, with nothing more to pay.

When credits come back

• A generation that fails is refunded automatically, at the moment it fails. You don't have to ask, and the credits are back in your balance before you see the failure.
• A run that is resumed rather than generated again is not charged twice. If a website was generated successfully and only putting it online failed, retrying picks up the design that already exists, so it costs nothing. Only a genuine re-generation costs credits again.

What is not refunded is a generation that worked. Deleting a generated website afterwards doesn't give the credits back, and the delete screen says so before you confirm.

Your invoices

Below the Credits block, Payment history lists every invoice billed to your details: credit purchases and your websites' subscriptions, in one list. Each row shows the date, the invoice number, what it was for, the amount, and whether it's Paid or Open. Download gives you the PDF.

A website's page in the portal shows the same invoices filtered down to that one website. This page is the complete picture.

Common issues

For what the credits actually buy, see Having AI build your website.