How AI Credits Work

Some of what Becoming does for you involves an AI model reading something on your behalf — a photographed page, a saved article, a newsletter, a video transcript — or shaping a Theme from your highlights. That work is measured in AI credits — a monthly allowance on a paid plan, and a one-time grant on a free trial. Everything else Becoming does isn’t metered at all.

Your monthly allowance

The Library comes with 150 AI credits a month.
The Academy comes with 400 AI credits a month.
Founding Member has the Academy allowance, for life.

Annual plans get the same monthly allowance each month. There’s nothing to buy or top up — credits are part of your plan, not a balance you hold.

On a free trial the credits work differently: a one-time grant, not a monthly allowance. See Free trials below.

What costs credits

What you ask Becoming to do	Credits
Read one photographed page	1
Read a whole web page you saved	1
Read a forwarded newsletter	1
Read a YouTube video’s transcript — per ~15 minutes	1
Generate a Theme from your whole library, with its Practices	66
Generate a Theme from one highlight or a typed intent, with its Practices	10
Extend a Theme for another four weeks	6

A credit buys an attempt, not a result. It’s spent once a model has read something — even when the honest answer is that there was nothing in there worth keeping, and even when its answer never made it back to us. It comes back only when the model never got to start: the provider was down or turned us away, or something broke on our side.

Themes and Practices are Academy features — they aren’t available on The Library, however many credits you have.

What never costs credits

Saving itself. The article, the video and its transcript, the newsletter, the photo — they always land in your library. Credits pay only for the AI reading that comes afterwards.
Every import connector: Kindle, Goodreads, Readwise, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, and file imports.
X posts — your bookmarks, your likes, and a single post pasted into Integrations → Save a link. A post’s text is the highlight, so no model has to read it: paste an article into that box and it costs 1 credit, paste an X post and it costs none.
Highlights you add yourself — typed in, pasted, or selected on a web page and saved with the extension. No model reads them, so there’s nothing to charge for.
Tagging, search, and the Daily Review email.
Book enrichment — covers, descriptions, and edition details.

When you run out

Running out is not an error. Imports keep working, everything you have saved stays readable, and nothing is lost — the only thing that pauses is the AI highlighting.

Photographed pages wait. They’re kept exactly as they are, and we pull their highlights once you have credits again.
Articles and newsletters still save, with their full content in your library. Only the AI highlighting waits.
Videos and their transcripts still save, and are highlighted as far as your credits go. We finish the rest later, picking up from the point it stopped.
Everything else keeps working: imports, your library, search, the Daily Review, and — on The Academy — the Practices you already have.

Waiting pages, articles, newsletters, and videos are picked up on their own once you have credits again — whether that’s a paid plan’s allowance resetting on the 1st, or a trial ending in a subscription. A large backlog is worked through over a few nights rather than all at once, so whatever you capture next still has credits of its own; a long video can take more than one night for the same reason.

Want a video sooner? Import it again once you have credits — it resumes where it stopped and doesn’t charge twice for the part already done.

Generating a Theme is the one exception. A Theme takes all of its credits up front, before any of the work happens, so it’s the single thing in Becoming that an empty balance actually stops — a new Theme, or extending one for another four weeks, has to wait until your credits are back. Nothing else is blocked, and nothing you capture in the meantime is lost.

When credits reset

A paid plan’s allowance resets on the 1st of each calendar month, whatever day you were billed. Unused credits don’t carry over to the next month and have no cash value.

If you change plans mid-month, your allowance becomes the new plan’s for the rest of that month — what you’ve already used this month still counts against it, so a plan change isn’t a fresh start. Move to a smaller allowance than you’ve already spent and you’ll have none left until the 1st. On the 1st you get the new plan’s allowance in full.

Trial credits work differently — see Free trials below.

Free trials

A trial comes with a one-time grant: 75 credits on the Library trial and 200 on the Academy trial. It’s per person, not per trial period — it isn’t topped up if you start another trial, and it doesn’t reset on the 1st the way a paid plan’s allowance does.

If you use the grant up, anything waiting on AI stays saved, with its highlights pending, until you subscribe. Everything else in Becoming keeps working as usual.