The credit numbers changed. The prices did not.

If you bought a pack a few weeks ago and have come back to it, every number in front of you is bigger than you remember. This is the post that accounts for that, because a figure that multiplies by ten without explanation has exactly one obvious reading, and the obvious reading is wrong.

The short version: the unit got smaller, so there are more of them. A credit used to be worth a whole marketing photo. It is now worth a tenth of one. Ten of them buy the photo that one of them used to buy, the photo is the same photo, and the pack still costs $24.

What the numbers are now

Read off the pricing module rather than from memory, because that is the only version that can be right:

• A marketing photo — 10 credits. A 4K upscale of one — 20.
• Ten seconds of standard film — 80 credits. A forty-second film is four of those, so 320.
• A draft render — 40 credits. A cinema render — 280.
• The packs — Try 120, Starter 400, Growth 1,600, Studio 4,800, at $9 / $24 / $79 / $199.

Every one of those is the old number with a nought on the end, and every dollar price is untouched. Starter was five films for $24 before and it is five films for $24 now. If you divide anything by anything, you get the answer you got last month.

Why bother, if nothing changed

Because a unit that is too coarse cannot express prices you want to charge, and we had run into the wall twice.

A credit was a whole photo, and photos were the cheapest thing in the product, so a credit was the smallest price that could exist. Anything we wanted to price below one photo had to be rounded to one photo or given away. A draft render — a deliberately rough, fast, cheap look at whether an idea works — is genuinely worth about half a finished film, and on the old scale the whole ladder of film quality had to fit into the integers 4, 8 and 28. There was no room under 1 at all.

The second wall was division. Credits are whole things; we cannot charge you two and two-fifths of one. Any discount or partial refund had to land on a whole credit, which meant rounding, and rounding on a small number is a large distortion. On the old scale the overnight discount came out at a different per-photo price depending on how many shots you ordered, purely as a rounding artefact. On the new scale it divides exactly and the artefact is gone, which turned out to be worth its own post on what the overnight lane now saves.

What to do with an older number

Multiply by ten. That is the whole conversion and it has no exceptions: every credit figure anywhere in the product, in a screenshot, in an email receipt, in a note you made for yourself, maps onto the new scale by adding a nought.

Your balance was converted the same way, so a pack you bought before the change is worth exactly what it was worth. If you had 12 credits left you now have 120, and they buy the same twelve photos.

The one thing not to do is compare a credit price here against a credit price somewhere else and conclude anything. A credit is an internal unit — ours is now a tenth of a photo, and another tool's might be a whole video. It was never comparable across products and it is less obviously comparable now. The number that compares is the one in dollars, against what you get for it.

There is a general version of this worth keeping, because it turns up every time a company changes how it counts rather than what it charges. A unit is a presentation choice, and the thing it presents can stay perfectly still while the presentation moves — the same reason a measurement answers exactly one question and not the one next to it. The cost of a change like this is entirely in the confusion, which is why it is worth the page.

If something in your account does not reconcile under the multiply-by-ten rule, that is a bug and not a price change, and we would rather hear about it than have you work around it.