How AskWek credits work — and why we built it this way

The problem with flat AI pricing

Almost every AI subscription on the market charges you a flat monthly fee and gives you "unlimited" access — but only to one or two specific models. Want to use GPT-5 instead of GPT-4o Mini? You're on a different plan. Want to switch to Claude Fable 5 for a difficult analysis task? That's the enterprise tier.

This is how AI companies lock you in to cheap models while charging premium prices.

We built AskWek's credit system to do the opposite: give you access to every model, with complete transparency about what each message actually costs you.

What is 1 credit?

1 credit = $0.00001 USD

That's one hundred-thousandth of a dollar. Credits are just a simple unit that maps to the actual API cost of AI models.

When you send a message to an AI model, that model charges based on the number of "tokens" processed — roughly 1 token per word. Different models have very different prices per token. Claude Fable 5 costs about 570x more per token than Amazon Nova Micro.

Instead of hiding this difference, AskWek shows it to you and lets you decide how to spend your credits.

The formula

For every AI response, AskWek calculates:

FORMULA: credits = (input_tokens x cost_per_1M_input + output_tokens x cost_per_1M_output) / 10

Where cost values come directly from the official API pricing of each provider.

Example — a typical chat exchange (500 input + 500 output tokens)

How smart routing helps

On the Free plan, AskWek automatically uses Amazon Nova Micro for most tasks. This is a surprisingly capable model for everyday questions — and because it's so cheap, your 50,000 free credits go a very long way.

On Advanced and above, you can select any model. AskWek also has smart routing built in — for simple questions it suggests cheaper models, for complex reasoning it recommends frontier models. You always make the final call.

Credits reset monthly — here's why

Credits reset at the start of every 30-day billing cycle. We know some users wish they could roll over unused credits, but there's a real reason we don't do this:

If credits accumulated indefinitely, we'd need to either raise prices for everyone to cover the liability, or limit what older credits could be spent on. Neither outcome is good for you.

Resetting credits monthly means we can price each plan fairly for the median user, and keep frontier model access available to everyone without tiering it away.

BYOS: bypass credits entirely

On the Platinum plan, you can connect your own API keys from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Groq. When you use a BYOS key, AskWek routes your request directly to the provider — no credits are deducted, no markup is added. You pay the provider directly at their published rates.

BYOS is ideal for power users who already have API agreements, or for businesses that want to use AskWek as a front-end while maintaining their own provider relationships.

Checking your balance

Your current credits, cap, and usage percentage are always visible in Settings. You'll also see the credit cost of each model in the model selector chip inside the chat screen. No surprises, ever.