The same 30 second video costs 90 credits on one model and 513 on another
We price in credits. One credit is ten cents. Looks clean until you put two models side by side.
A 30 second 1080p clip is 90 credits on one video model and 513 on another. Same output spec, 5.7x the price. Credits were supposed to make cost legible and they do the opposite, because nobody carries a mental conversion rate. The number on the button is noise, so people find out what a generation costs after they have spent it.
The thing that actually moved the needle for us was putting the cost on the generate button itself, per model, before the click. Not on a pricing page, not in a tooltip.
The other one we got wrong early is worse. Our sign-in gate promised a credit amount that didn't match what the account actually got. That's not confusing pricing, that's a trust bug, and we only caught it by auditing every modal in the product one by one.
If you run credits, go and compare your cheapest and most expensive model on an identical output right now. The spread is usually wider than you'd guess, and your users are the ones absorbing it.
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Yeah catching that before launch probably saved a lot of confusion for users and the team
We stopped using credits entirely because our users could never tell if a job was cheap or expensive until after. Showing price on the button feels obvious once you say it.