What AI costs: credits, tokens and waste
Everything that isn't AI in NovLore is free: unlimited works, editor, structure, dashboard, dictation, versions, trash, downloads. AI, on the other hand, uses credits, bought in one-off packages. Understanding how they're counted helps you not run out sooner than expected.
A price per action
Every AI action has a fixed cost in credits, tuned to its real weight:
| Action | Order of magnitude |
|---|---|
| Correction, chat message | very few credits |
| Cleaned-up dictation, rewriting a passage | a few credits |
| Outline of a chapter | several credits |
| Structure of the whole book | tens of credits |
| A fully generated chapter | many credits |
Above a confirmation threshold, before it starts the app shows you the cost, your current balance and the expected balance left: no heavy operation fires by surprise.
Underneath: tokens
The credit is the currency; the real count is in tokens — how much text goes into the model and how much comes out. In go your request and the context around it — the story bible, the open chapter, the last few messages. Out comes the answer. The more text in play, the more it costs.
That's why the real dollar cost of each action is recorded as is, not recalculated: it lets you keep an eye on where the spending goes.
The two typical wastes
- Pasting what the app already sends. If you select a character from the selector, their card travels automatically. Re-pasting it counts it twice.
- Endless conversations on one thread. Only the last few messages go to the model anyway, but a very long thread is harder for you to follow and easier to fill with redundant requests. Better short, on-topic threads.
A third, minor one: asking for a generated chapter in real time when you could have sent it to batch and paid less.
Expiry
Credits expire 12 months after the top-up, and they're always spent starting from the batch that expires first. It's not worth topping up while the ones you have are enough: you avoid stacking batches with different expiry dates.
Frequently asked questions
If an AI action fails, do I lose the credits?
No. The charge happens before the call, but if the call doesn't succeed the credits go back to the original batch, with the same expiry as before. You only pay for answers that arrive.
How do I know how much I have left?
There's a bar showing the percentage against your last top-up. Below 25% the top-up prompt appears, below 10% it fills up. And for every action above the threshold you see the estimate before confirming.