How credits work

Credits are the only thing you buy on artCart.AI. There is no subscription, no per-order fee and no commission on your sales. This is exactly how they work.

What a credit is

A credit is a unit of AI image generation. Credits are sold in packs — currently 100 credits for $10 as a one-off purchase — and they do not expire. Buy a pack and spend it over a year if that suits how you work.

What an image costs

Between one and five credits, depending on the model. That range reflects what the underlying providers charge: a fast, premium model genuinely costs more per image than a cheap open one.

The exact rate for every model is shown on the generate screen, and the form totals the cost of your run before you press the button. You are never guessing.

Models that return a batch

Midjourney always returns four images per run, and you are charged for all four. At three credits per image that is twelve credits for one press of the button.

This is worth knowing when you are exploring. Four readings of a prompt is genuinely useful early on; it is expensive once you already know what you want. Most other models let you choose how many images to produce.

When you are charged

Credits come off your balance only when images have been successfully produced and staged for you to review. Specifically:

• Your balance is checked before a run starts. If you cannot afford it, the run does not begin and nothing is deducted.
• If the provider rejects the prompt, times out or errors, you are not charged.
• If images come back, you are charged for the number that actually arrived.
• Saving an image to your gallery is free. So is discarding one. You have already paid for it at generation time.

Nothing else on the platform costs credits. Editing artwork, setting prices, uploading your own images, taking orders and running your storefront are all included.

Making a pack last

The single biggest saving is drafting cheap and finishing expensive:

1. Work out your prompt on a 1–2 credit model. Expect five or ten attempts — that is ten to twenty credits.
2. Once the composition is right, run the winning prompt once on your premium model. Four or five credits.
3. A finished, sellable piece typically lands under ten credits all in, including the failures.

Which means a $10 pack realistically produces around ten polished artworks, not twenty-five, once you account for the exploration. That is still roughly a dollar per saleable piece.

Two other habits help: use More like this rather than retyping a prompt from memory and getting a different result, and check Saved prompts before starting from scratch — you may have already solved the problem.

Buying more

Purchase credits in the dashboard sidebar, or the top-up link next to your balance. Payment is handled by Stripe and credits are added to your account as soon as it clears.

Running out

Nothing breaks. Your storefront stays live, keeps taking orders and keeps delivering digital downloads. Your existing artwork is unaffected. The only thing you cannot do is generate new images until you top up.

Free credits

Every new account starts with free credits so you can try the generator before spending anything, and no card is required to sign up. Enough to find out whether the output suits the work you want to sell.

See the model list for current per-model rates, or pricing for the wider picture.