Credits
How platform usage is metered, priced and settled.
Credits are the single unit of usage on Perspective AI. Every billable action — a chat message, an image, an agent step — draws down credits, and everything is priced in the same unit, so you always know what you are spending.
One unit for everything
Whatever you do on the platform, you pay in credits:
- Inference — messages to any text, image or video model.
- Agents — each operation an agent performs, including tool use and command execution.
- Previews — trying an agent before you clone it.
Credits are shown to you in stable, dollar-legible terms — "$5 of credits", not an abstract points balance — so cost stays legible regardless of what any model charges underneath.
How usage is metered
Metering matches how each model actually bills:
| What you use | How it's metered |
|---|---|
| Text / reasoning models | Tokens — input sent + output received |
| Image / video models | Per generation |
| Agents | Per operation (steps, tool calls, command runs) |
Each model carries its own rate, derived from its real provider cost plus a thin platform margin (see Models and Tokenomics §4). Rates are refreshed as provider costs change.
Cost legibility is a core feature, not a setting. Every action shows what it costs. Perspective AI rejects the industry habit of hiding consumption to maximise spend.
Where credits come from
- Subscriptions — each plan includes a recurring monthly credit allowance.
- Top-ups — buy additional credits whenever you need more than your plan includes.
- Stake-to-mint (planned) — locking $POV mints a daily, replenishing credit allowance (roughly 1 unit ≈ $1/day of credits), tying holding directly to usage capacity. See Tokenomics §4.
What happens underneath
You never need to see, hold, or understand $POV to use credits. But underneath the dollar-legible surface, credit settlement is where the token does its work:
Real usage becomes real buy pressure on $POV, and against a fixed supply every burn is permanently deflationary. The full mechanism — demand-gated emissions, the buyback-and-burn sink, and the KPI that governs it — is in Tokenomics.
Crypto-native users can interact with the raw $POV settlement layer directly. Everyone else can ignore it entirely and simply watch their dollar balance.