AI pricing has become its own genre of confusion. Tokens, credits, messages, requests, compute units — different products use different terms for roughly the same underlying concept, making direct comparison nearly impossible. Here is a plain-English explanation of how AI pricing actually works.
What Is a Token?
A token is the basic unit of AI computation. Roughly speaking, one token equals about four characters of English text, or about 0.75 words. The sentence "Tell me about the weather" is about six tokens. A long essay might be thousands of tokens.
Language models process text in tokens — both the text you send (the prompt) and the text they generate (the completion). The total cost of any AI interaction is roughly: (tokens in your message) + (tokens in the AI's response) × (cost per token for that model).
Higher-capability models cost more per token. GPT-4o costs more than GPT-4o Mini. Claude Opus costs more than Claude Haiku. The model you use has a bigger impact on cost than the length of your messages.
What Are Credits?
Credits are a simplified abstraction over tokens. Rather than billing you for exact token counts, a service gives you a credit balance and charges some number of credits per message. This is easier to understand but hides the actual cost.
Hey Friday uses chat credits. Each message you send costs one credit, regardless of length. This simplicity is intentional: you know exactly how many messages you have left without doing math. Free accounts get 100 credits per day; premium accounts get larger monthly allocations.
Why Do Different Models Cost Different Amounts?
The cost of running an AI model scales roughly with its size. Larger models have more parameters, require more computation per token, and need more powerful (and expensive) hardware. GPT-4o, which has hundreds of billions of parameters, costs significantly more to run than GPT-4o Mini, which is designed to be efficient.
This is why many AI assistants offer multiple models at different price points. The free tier gets the smaller, cheaper model. Premium tiers unlock the more capable, more expensive models. The right choice depends on what you need: for most everyday queries, the cheaper models are completely adequate.
Subscriptions vs. Pay-As-You-Go
AI pricing generally comes in two flavors. Subscriptions give you a monthly credit or message allowance for a flat fee — predictable costs, but you may over or underuse your allocation. Pay-as-you-go charges you exactly for what you use, with no waste, but costs can be unpredictable for variable usage.
For individual consumers, subscriptions are usually better: the flat fee is worth the predictability, and most heavy users get more value than they pay for. For developers building applications, pay-as-you-go API pricing usually makes more sense.
Image Credits Are Different from Chat Credits
AI image generation is priced separately from text AI, because the computational requirements are completely different. Generating an image requires running a diffusion model, which is far more computationally intensive than generating text.
Hey Friday separates chat credits (for AI conversations) from image credits (for AI image generation). Basic image generation using Pollinations FLUX is always free. Pro-quality images use image credits, which can be earned through rewarded ads or purchased as one-time packs. Image credits never expire.
How to Maximize Your Free Allocation
- Be concise. Longer prompts use more tokens. Clear, specific questions get better answers and cost less than vague, rambling ones.
- Choose the right model. If you are asking a simple factual question, the free-tier model is usually fine. Save premium model credits for genuinely complex tasks.
- Avoid unnecessary back-and-forth. Each message in a conversation uses tokens. Include all relevant context in your initial message to reduce the number of follow-ups needed.
- Reset timing matters. If you are near your daily limit in the evening, save non-urgent queries for after the daily reset.
AI pricing will continue to fall as models become more efficient. What costs $20 per month today may cost $5 in two years. But understanding the current pricing landscape helps you make smart decisions now about which services to use and which to avoid.