Why AI video tools use credits

The three real reasons

1. Credits hide the price. "25 credits per second" doesn't trigger the mental arithmetic "$0.25 per second" does. Detaching the number you see from the money you spend is the entire behavioral design — it's the casino-chip principle applied to compute.

2. Credits enable price changes without price changes. A vendor never has to announce "we raised prices"; it just adjusts how many credits a generation burns. Runway's tiers demonstrate the flexibility: Gen-4 Turbo costs 5 credits/second, Gen-4.5 costs 25 — a 5× price difference wearing the same currency.

3. Breakage is profit. Monthly credits that expire unused are revenue without compute cost. Subscription tiers are sized so typical users leave 15–30% on the table.

How to beat the system

• Always convert: credits-per-second × price-per-credit = $/s. Do it before subscribing, per model, per mode. Our conversion tables have the majors pre-computed.
• Size the plan to real usage: last month's actual generation seconds, not ambitions. Upgrade later; breakage never refunds.
• Watch burn multipliers: pro modes and higher resolutions double or triple credit burn quietly — Kling being the classic example.

None of this makes credit vendors bad — Runway and Kling deliver real value — it makes them vendors. The defense is one division you do and they'd rather you didn't.