Credits & Billing

Credits & Billing

ACECode bills usage in credits. One credit equals $0.0001 of underlying LLM cost. You see credit totals in your dashboard — not raw token counts — because the dollar cost of a request depends on the model used, the context length, and the task, none of which we want you to track manually.

What a credit pays for

Every action that calls an LLM or runs a quality-tier task consumes credits:

Task	Typical credit cost (per call)
search (basic)	0 — free, served from cache or pure DB
search (LLM rerank, max/business)	5-20
enrich (auto mode)	30-150
review (AI code review on a diff)	50-300
recall / remember	0-5
validate (hallucination check)	5-15
recap (session compression)	20-80

Embedding (Voyage) and reranking are not billed to your credit ledger — they’re tracked separately in a hidden monthly quota and included in every tier. You won’t see them on your statement.

Note

Credit costs are estimates — the actual cost is reserved at request start and reconciled after the LLM finishes. If the response is shorter than estimated, the unused credits are returned to your balance.

Tiers

Tier	Price	Credits / month	What you get
Free	$0	5,000	CLI + MCP, 1 project, community routing (gpt-5.5)
Pro	$19/mo	50,000	+ ADE access, 10 projects, model preference (Grok / GPT / Gemini), Discord priority
Max	$49/mo	250,000	+ Higher quality (Grok 4.3 on quality tasks by default), 50 projects, multi-key embedding pool
Business	$199/mo	1,500,000	+ Self-host, SSO, audit log, dedicated support, SLA, unlimited projects

Credits don’t roll over month-to-month. If you need more than your tier includes, you can buy a credit pack at $1 per 1,000 credits (one-time, never expires).

Model choice affects cost

Pro+ users can override the default model for quality tasks (rerank, review, memory refine). Cheaper models cost fewer credits per call:

• cx/gpt-5.5 (default Free/Pro) — baseline cost
• grok-4.3 (default Max/Business) — ~2-3× baseline, higher quality on long contexts
• deepseek-v4-flash (fallback) — ~0.5× baseline, 3-4× faster than gpt-5.5
• gemini-2.5-flash-lite (fallback) — ~0.3× baseline, lowest quality

Your dashboard shows the per-task model used so you can tune the trade-off.

Cost-optimized mode

If you’d rather burn fewer credits than chase the highest answer quality, toggle Cost-Optimized LLM Mode in account settings. This downgrades quality tasks from Grok to gpt-5.5 on Max / Business — typically cutting credit consumption by ~40-60% on heavy MCP-tool sessions.

Reservation flow (technical detail)

ACE uses two-phase credit reservation:

1. Reserve — at request start, the maximum possible cost is held against your balance. If your balance is too low, the request fails with 402 Insufficient credits before the LLM is called.
2. Commit / void — when the LLM finishes, the actual cost is committed and the difference is voided back to your balance. If the LLM call fails (timeout, provider error), the full reservation is voided.

You see both states in the credit ledger: status=reserved (held) and status=committed (settled). Reserved entries that don’t commit within 60 seconds are auto-voided.

Where to check your usage

• Dashboard at app.acecode.dev/billing — current balance, this-month spend, top tasks by cost.
• API — GET https://api.acecode.dev/v1/billing/balance returns your current balance.
• Webhook — Business tier can subscribe to credit.low events to be paged when balance drops below a threshold.

Free-tier limits

Beyond credits, the Free tier has hard limits that prevent runaway storage:

• 1 project
• 50,000 indexed chunks total
• 100 indexed files per project
• ADE locked (Pro+)

Pro / Max raise these proportionally. Business is unlimited (limited by your self-hosted infrastructure).

Refunds

Subscriptions are non-refundable for the current billing cycle but can be cancelled at any time — you keep access until the cycle ends. Credit packs purchased one-time are refundable within 30 days if untouched (≥ 95% of the pack still in balance).