Studio Plus
How credits work
What a credit is, exactly what each AI action costs, when credits reset, when they are refunded, and how to make them go further.
The short version
A credit measures AI creation use. Your subscription grants a set number every month. Every action that costs credits tells you the exact price on the button before you press it.
That’s the whole system.
What each action costs
| Action | Credits |
|---|---|
| Prepare a suggested description | Free — rate limited |
| Generate or restyle one illustration | 1 |
| Generate a story or travelogue draft | 1 |
| Generate narration for one page | 2 |
| Economy video · 4 seconds | 1 |
| Economy video · 6 seconds | 2 |
| Economy video · 8 seconds | 2 |
| Balanced video · 4 seconds | 2 |
| Balanced video · 6 seconds | 3 |
| Balanced video · 8 seconds | 4 |
| Cinematic video · 4 seconds | 8 |
| Cinematic video · 6 seconds | 12 |
| Cinematic video · 8 seconds | 16 |
Everything not on this list — drawing, editing, layout, recording your own narration, music, PDF export, video export, backups — costs nothing.
What a month’s allowance gets you
Take a 20-credit month as an example. That is any one of:
- twenty illustrations; or
- ten AI narrations; or
- twenty four-second Economy clips; or
- a ten-page book with ten generated illustrations and five narrations; or
- two four-second Cinematic clips, with four credits left over.
That last line is the one to notice. Cinematic video eats an allowance very quickly, which is why Economy is the default.
Why video costs so much more
Because it genuinely does. Generating eight seconds of high-quality video costs orders of magnitude more than generating one still image. We could hide that by averaging it across everyone, but then light users would be subsidising heavy video use and we would have to cap things silently.
Showing the real relative cost lets you decide. Most pages do not need video, and one moving page in a book is more striking than ten.
When credits come back
Automatic refund: provider failure, safety refusal, empty or corrupt output.
No refund: a successful generation you did not like.
Retry protection: repeating the same active request ID does not reserve the same charge twice. Full restart recovery is not available yet.
Making an allowance go further
- Write better descriptions. Two minutes of editing beats three rerolls. See write a better prompt.
- Default to Economy video. On a phone screen, most viewers cannot tell.
- Record your own narration. Free, unlimited, and better for a keepsake.
- Use sketches and photographs directly. They cost nothing and often suit the book better.
- Reuse a prompt that worked. Change only the subject, keep the style.
Credit questions
Are credits money?
When do my credits reset?
Do unused credits roll over?
What happens if a generation fails?
Can I get a refund for a result I did not like?
What happens if the app closes during generation?
Start with one drawing
Download Doodle Dragon Studio, pick a sketch off the fridge, and see it as a finished page in a few minutes. The free tier is genuinely free — no trial clock, no credit card.