Why NovLore Sells Credits, Not a Subscription
Nobody writes a novel at a steady pace. There are weeks when you write ten thousand words and months when you write none — a job changes, a block hits, life gets in the way. A monthly subscription is built for regular use: someone who pays in January and doesn't reopen the book until March has still paid for two months of nothing. For a writing tool, which by its nature gets used in fits and starts, that felt like a mismatch between how people actually write and how they'd be paying for it.
What's free, and why everything except AI
The editor, book structure, character sheets, plot, dashboard, dictation, version history, trash, and manuscript downloads (TXT, Markdown, Word, HTML) are free and unlimited, for any number of books. It isn't a stripped-down version meant to hook people who then have to pay to unlock the rest — it's everything you need to write a novel from start to finish without ever hitting a wall.
The only thing with a real cost, and therefore a price, is the AI — because every request to a language model costs NovLore an actual amount, paid to the provider that processes it. Charging for what has a direct cost, and leaving free what doesn't, seemed like the only honest pricing.
How credits work
Credits are bought in packs — 500, 2,000, or 10,000 — as a one-time payment, not an automatic renewal. Every AI action has a fixed cost in credits, published in a single price list: a correction costs 1, a rewrite costs 3, generating a whole chapter costs 50. You see the cost before confirming, along with your current balance and what would remain afterward — above a certain threshold, confirmation is mandatory, precisely to avoid discovering the cost after the fact.
There's no monthly expiry on the pack: credits stay usable for 12 months from the top-up. After that year, unused ones expire — but a year is roughly how long it takes most novels, even written at a relaxed pace, to reach the end of a first draft.
Why it isn't "pay until you're done"
A credit pack with no other rules would have a flaw: someone with plenty of credit left has no reason to top up, but a system that keeps offering the purchase anyway would end up stacking packs with different expiry dates without the user noticing. That's why the purchase option only appears once the balance drops below a threshold — equal to the cost of the most expensive action on the price list — so unnecessary top-ups don't pile up, and anyone with enough left to keep writing isn't interrupted to buy something they don't need yet.
Refunds: the part a subscription never has to handle
A subscription just gets canceled: you stop paying, and the current month is either lost or gained depending on how you look at it. A prepaid credit pack is different — it's closer to buying a block of hours than subscribing to a service — which is why NovLore refunds the unused share of credits, proportionally, if requested within 90 days of purchase. The first three weeks (20 days) carry no deduction at all; after that, a small percentage covers the cost of processing the refund itself, calculated only on the portion returned — not on the whole purchase, which would zero out the refund for someone who's already written through most of the pack.
It's more work to build than a simple "cancel subscription," but it's the direct consequence of choosing a model where you pay once instead of every month: if the payment doesn't repeat, going back has to work differently too.
Frequently asked questions
If I don't write for a few months, do I lose everything I paid for?
No. The only thing with an expiry date is unused AI credits, and they expire 12 months after purchase — not after a month, not after a week of inactivity. Your books, chapters, character and plot sheets, and everything else stay yours with no time limit, whether you have credits left or not.
What happens if I run out of credits halfway through an AI-generated scene?
It doesn't happen mid-way: the cost of every action is fixed and known before you launch it, shown alongside your projected remaining balance. If the balance isn't enough for the action you chose, NovLore says so before starting — not once the operation is already underway — and offers to top up right there.