What a credit is
A credit is the unit Orcyx meters its own hosted features in. When Orcyx pays a provider on your behalf — to transcribe audio, or to run a hosted model — that cost is converted into credits and drawn from your balance. Credits are not tokens, not minutes and not requests; they are one unit across every hosted feature, so a month of mixed usage is a single number.
The monthly allowance
Pro includes 12,500 credits a month. On an annual plan you receive the same 12,500 each month on the anniversary of the day you started, not the whole year at once — the promise is a monthly allowance, and that is what is granted.
Unused cycle credits do not roll over. When the next month is granted, whatever is left of the previous month expires. It is not a penalty and not a policy we vary quietly: the allowance is per month, and a balance that accumulated forever would be a different product.
Two balances, and which is spent first
- Cycle credits — this month's allowance. They expire when the next month is granted.
- Purchased credits — credit packs you bought. They never expire.
Cycle credits are always spent first, so a pack you bought is still there after a month you did not fully use. That ordering is why buying a pack early costs you nothing in expiry.
Credit packs
Packs come in 5,000, 25,000 and 100,000 credits, bought from the Credits page in the account portal. They top up the purchased balance, never the cycle balance, so they do not expire.
A pack requires an active paid plan. If a pack is not on sale in your region the button says so rather than failing at checkout, and if a pack has no configured price it says that instead — two different problems, named separately.
Refunding a pack reverses that pack's credits from your purchased balance. It never touches plan credits.
What is metered
Only Orcyx-hosted work is metered. As each hosted feature ships it draws from your balance:
- Cloud transcription — dictation when you choose the cloud engine, charged by audio duration.
- Hosted prompt enhancement — rewriting a prompt through an Orcyx-hosted model, charged by tokens.
- Sage realtime voice — a hosted realtime conversation, charged by session minute.
Not every hosted feature is live yet. Until they ship, a monthly allowance has little to spend itself on — we would rather say that plainly than let a large number on a plan page imply otherwise.
What is never metered
Anything that runs on your own machine or through your own provider account costs zero credits, always:
- Command-line agent turns, including whole swarms of them.
- Local transcription models running on your hardware.
- Terminals, files, editors and browser panes.
- Local tool servers.
- Any provider you bring your own key for — you pay that provider directly, and Orcyx adds no markup to it.
Bundled credits carry Orcyx's margin because Orcyx pays the provider. Your own keys do not, because you do. Both statements are always true together.
Holds, settlement and failures
A metered call places a hold for its estimated cost before it starts, then settles at what it actually cost when it finishes — the difference goes straight back. A call that fails returns its whole hold. You are never charged for work that did not happen.
Held credits are already out of your spendable balance, and the portal reports them separately so a balance that looks low mid-task is explained rather than mysterious.
The money-back guarantee
Every plan carries a seven-day money-back guarantee. Ask within seven days of your first charge and you get the money back. Refunds are processed by hand, so allow a few working days.
When the guarantee is applied we refund that first charge, end paid access, and zero the unused credits from the cycle it paid for. Credits you bought separately in a pack are not touched. That is the whole of it — there is no fine print underneath.