Prepaid Credits for AI Products: How They Work

Prepaid credits are upfront-paid balances for future product usage, commonly used by AI platforms to provide predictable customer spending while supporting different costs for models, media generation, tools, and agent workflows through configurable burn rates. Although the basic flow is payment, credit grant, usage, and deduction, effective systems must also manage ownership, shared wallets, multiple credit sources, expiration, rollover, top-ups, refunds, manual adjustments, and transitions to postpaid billing. Because paid, included, promotional, and contract-based credits can have different rules and value, a credit balance should be maintained as a transaction ledger that preserves each credit’s origin and history rather than as a single mutable number. Burn-order rules, often prioritizing soonest-expiring credits, determine which balance is used first and can materially affect customer value, while concurrent usage requires real-time checks to avoid overspending. The text emphasizes defining credit meaning, pricing, access, expiration, refund, and fallback policies before launch, and presents Stigg as infrastructure for managing ledger-backed balances, metering, entitlements, shared pools, burn rules, and low-latency balance enforcement alongside an existing billing system.

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