AI credits are company scrip: why vendors price subscriptions in units they mint, expire, and revalue

An AI subscription is priced in dollars but denominated in a currency the vendor prints. OpenAI sells credits valid for 12 months from purchase and that, in the company's words, "have no cash value" 1. Anthropic sells "usage" measured in limits it defines. Bolt.new meters tokens. The dollar on the plan card is the on-ramp. Once you are inside, you spend units the vendor mints, expires, and revalues, and that design has a name much older than computing: company scrip.

Company scrip was a substitute for legal tender, issued by an employer, redeemable only at the company store, and the metal coins it came on usually carried the stamp "non-transferrable" 2. The employer owned the unit of account, which meant it also owned the exchange rate, the store's markups, and a large share of the worker's ability to leave. AI subscriptions rebuilt that machine in software. Read them as currencies rather than price lists, and four consequences follow.

The mechanism: the vendor owns the unit of account

A private currency has three parts, and in every AI subscription the vendor holds all three.

The first is the mint. The vendor defines the unit and what it is called: OpenAI credits, Anthropic usage limits, Bolt.new tokens, Perplexity credits, GitHub AI Credits. Five vendors, five denominations, and no rate anywhere on the plans cited here that converts one into another.

The second is the exchange rate, meaning what one unit buys. Vendors post that rate only at the margin, where you buy more of the currency: Devin's page says extra usage is "consumed at API pricing" 3. Anthropic reserves the right to move everything with one printed sentence: "Price and plans are subject to change at Anthropic's discretion" 4.

The third is the clock and the ledger: when the balance dies, and what the vendor is allowed to change about it. The four consequences below are those dials turned against the holder.

Breakage: the reset that books your money as vendor revenue

When an allowance does not roll over, every reset lapses the unspent part back to the issuer, and the issuer keeps the dollars you paid for it. OpenAI is explicit that unused credits "do not roll over" after their 12-month life 1. Perplexity's monthly Computer credits vanish when the billing cycle refreshes, and its bonus credits carry a 30-day fuse 5. The arithmetic cuts both ways: spend half of a non-rolling monthly allowance and your effective price per unit doubles, because the surrendered half was still paid for in full.

Expiry is a design choice, not physics. Bolt.new's plan comparison table carries a row labeled "Unused Tokens roll over," marked "Included" on Pro, Teams and Enterprise and "Not included" on Free, and its Pro card prints "10M tokens/month, rollover included" 6. Windsurf's old add-on credits never expired either, though they could only be spent while the subscription stayed alive 7. The clocks differ plan by plan even inside one vendor, which is why we maintain reset trackers: OpenAI's windows are mapped plan by plan here 8, Bolt's token rules here 9, and the credit rules across OpenAI's coding plans here 10.

Scrip's version of breakage ran through redemption. Exchanging scrip into cash cost a discount or a fee, so the balance shrank on its way out the door 2.

Silent devaluation: the price rise that never touches a price tag

Redefine what a unit buys and you have raised the price without moving it. The switches are dated and public:

• March 2026: Windsurf, the AI IDE Cognition renamed Devin Desktop, retired its monthly prompt credits, sold at $0.04 each, in favor of daily and weekly token quotas; purchased credits were converted into a dollar-denominated extra-usage balance 7
• April 14, 2026: Devin retired its Core and Team plans, though seats survive (Teams at $80 a month plus $40 per full dev seat), and self-serve overage billing moved from ACU accounting to dollars at underlying model cost; enterprise billing continues on ACUs 11
• June 1, 2026: GitHub Copilot retired premium requests, its second meter change in under a year, for AI Credits worth $0.01 each and consumed per token 11

The same lever works inside a single vendor. The rate table in OpenAI's help article for ChatGPT for Word, Excel/Sheets and PowerPoint prices a million input tokens at 5 credits on GPT-5.6 Luna and 250 credits on GPT-6 Astra, a 50-to-1 spread between two models on one card (our arithmetic on the two printed numbers, not a figure OpenAI prints), so a change in the default model reprices every message while the subscription sticker stays put 1.

The product can drift under you as well: models retire, allowances erode, serving stacks change. That is the complementary failure, and our explainer on the moving target covers it in full 12. The distinction matters. Product drift changes what a unit delivers. Unit drift changes what the unit is.

Why you cannot comparison-shop a $20 plan

Claude Pro, Devin Pro and Perplexity Pro each bill $20 a month on monthly billing. That figure is not every vendor's headline number: Anthropic foregrounds Claude Pro at $17 a month billed annually ($200 up front, with "$20 if billed monthly" in smaller text), Perplexity's pricing hub displays annual-only figures ($17 a month billed annually for Pro), and Devin prints $20 flat 43135. One sells "usage," one sells a token quota refreshed on two clocks, one sells credits that fund an agent. The exchange rates that do exist are internal to each vendor: Perplexity's help center prints 100 credits for $1, which prices the 10,000 monthly credits on its $200 Max plan at $100, half the subscription's price 5. GitHub prints one credit to one cent, which prices Copilot Pro's included grant at exactly its seat price 11. OpenAI prints no dollar face on its credits at all, only credits per token 1. The only honest comparison unit is the task you repeat, not the unit the vendor names.

The support-agent market shows what happens when everyone adopts the same label without a shared unit 11:

• Intercom Fin: $0.99 per outcome
• Zendesk: $1.50 to $2.00 per automated resolution
• HubSpot: $0.50 per resolved conversation
• Salesforce Agentforce: from $2.00 per conversation

Four dollar prices, four different definitions of what triggers the bill. The label is standardized; the unit is not.

Lock-in: the balance is the exit fee

OpenAI prints the exit cost in one sentence: credits are "non-transferable, have no cash value, and cannot be resold or gifted" 1. The coal scrip that opened this piece said the same thing in metal: the coins carried the stamp "non-transferrable" 2. A non-transferable balance turns switching into a capital loss, because the allowance you paid for stays behind with the vendor that minted it. Anthropic's Max plans include "$100 to $200/month in API credits" 4: dollars by name, but minted by the vendor, capped by the month, and spendable only in its store. Redemption is possible when a vendor chooses it. Windsurf's credit-to-quota migration converted purchased credits into a dollar balance refundable through support 7. That a single redemption route is worth noting is the strongest evidence of how rare it is.

How long it took to outlaw scrip, and how fast it came back

The scrip record and the AI pricing record live on different pages. Assembled in order, they tell one story:

1. Late 1800s: US coal companies pay wages in scrip redeemable only at the company store; an estimated 75 percent of all scrip circulates in the coalfields of Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia 2
2. Early 1900s: US courts deem non-transferable scrip unconstitutional; it persists anyway in Kentucky and West Virginia 2
3. 1938: the Fair Labor Standards Act makes paying wages in scrip illegal in the United States 2
4. 1967: Congress officially outlaws the remaining coal scrip 2
5. March 2026: Windsurf retires prompt credits for daily and weekly token quotas 7
6. April 14, 2026: Devin retires its Core and Team plans (seats survive, with Teams at $80 a month plus $40 per full dev seat) and moves self-serve overage billing from ACU accounting to dollars at underlying model cost, while enterprise billing continues on ACUs 11
7. June 1, 2026: Copilot retires premium requests for per-token AI Credits at $0.01 11

Britain killed the same wage system under the Truck Acts; the American bans arrived in 1938 and 1967, 29 years apart 2. Every one of those laws governs how wages are paid. None of them addresses what a seller may name the units of a voluntary subscription, and that gap is where AI pricing operates.

So budget AI spend in tasks and expiries, not sticker prices. Three numbers describe any plan better than its price does: the unit it grants, the clock that kills the unspent part, and the exchange rate posted at the margin. Our subscription calculator converts plans into those terms 14. The sticker tells you what you pay. The exchange rate tells you what you own.