What an AI design change costs, in credits
What a credit is, how many it takes to change a button, a page or the whole site, what costs nothing, and why every credit comes back if the AI fails.
Wixy 4 min read
A credit is a unit, and abstract units are hard to understand. So this post is about turning it into an intuition: what a specific change costs, what costs nothing, and what happens to your balance when something goes wrong.
What a credit is
When you ask the AI for a change, a model reads part of your website’s code and writes a new version. That work has a real cost, which depends on how much context has to be sent and how much code comes back. The credit is how we charge you for it without you having to understand tokens or sign up for your own key with a provider.
The formula is public: provider cost × plan multiplier ÷ credit value, rounded up. The price table per model lives in versioned code, and every use stores a copy of the price that was applied. If the rate changes tomorrow, what you spent yesterday isn’t rewritten.
The equivalence table
What matters isn’t the formula. It’s this:
| What you type | Scope | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| “make the main button yellow” | this section | ~1 |
| “put the form at the top and the map at the end” | this page | ~3 |
| “give the whole site a more serious feel” | whole site | ~5 |
These are estimates: the exact cost comes from the real tokens of each call, and you see it in the history next to the version it produced. So the free plan’s 50 credits cover dozens of small tweaks a month; the Professional plan’s 300 cover several full redesigns.
Why scope decides the price
The difference between 1 and 5 isn’t how hard the change is. It’s how much code has to be sent to the model.
- This section sends a single component (the hero, the footer, the services grid) with its data contract and a sample of the content. It’s the cheapest and the most precise.
- This page sends the components of that page’s blocks plus its template.
- Whole site sends, by default, the tokens and styles: colors, typography, spacing, radii, shadows. That covers most “give my site a new look” requests by touching two files instead of forty. If the change doesn’t fit there, it’s done in steps, one block at a time.
Sending the entire project to move a button would be expensive, slow and, worst of all, more likely to make the model touch what nobody asked it to. That’s why you choose the scope.
How you’re charged: reserve, then settle
Before calling the model, the system estimates the cost and reserves that balance. If it isn’t enough, no call is made: you’re told how much you’re short. After the call, it settles with the real tokens: what was used is charged and the difference is returned. You never pay the estimate; you pay what it cost.
When everything comes back
This is the part we care about most, because it’s the one almost no tool answers well. Our failure is not your bill. Every credit comes back if:
- the model’s proposal touches something it’s forbidden to touch (the checkout page, the SEO
<head>, form submission) and our policy rejects it; - validation fails twice in a row;
- the model refuses or gets cut off halfway;
- the proposal produces no change at all.
In all those cases the call is recorded as our cost, not yours. If the model tried something forbidden, we’re the ones who need to tune the instructions. How that policy is built is a rule in the code, not a marketing promise.
What costs nothing
More than you’d think:
- Asking for a content change. If you type “change the hero title to ‘Open on Sundays’”, the panel doesn’t spend credits: it tells you that’s changed under Pages and gives you the link. The design AI is for design.
- Previews, history, publishing and rolling back. Every change is a version and moving between them costs nothing.
- The SEO analysis and its score. They’re deterministic checks and keep working with your balance at zero.
- Your published site. Out of credits, it stays published. Credits buy changes, not uptime.
How to spend less
- Pick the smallest scope that works. If the change is in the hero, ask for “this section.”
- One thing per instruction. “Yellow button, bigger” is one change; “redo the hero, the footer and the colors” is three, and it costs like three.
- Keep editing instead of starting over. “Keep editing” starts from the version just generated and only sends what changed.
- Describe the outcome, not the code. “Make it easier to read on a phone” works better than a list of CSS properties.
The plans, in credits
Free, 50 a month. Professional ($19/month), 300. Store ($39/month), 600. Agency ($99/month), 2,000. Credits granted by the plan don’t carry over from month to month; the ones you buy do. We warn you at 80% and at 100% of usage, in the panel and by email, and the pricing page has the full table of what each plan includes.
And if what worries you is an AI redesign hurting your rankings, that question has its own post.
- credits
- ai
- pricing