The allowance, not the price, is the repricing lever
Vendors are repricing through the included allowance rather than the sticker: 17 of 353 corpus companies moved what a plan includes — credits, tool calls, RAM ceilings, seats, storage, credit lifespan — while leaving every published dollar figure intact, 7 downward and 10 upward. The enabler is credit consolidation: once many per-feature meters collapse into a single currency, the burn table and the monthly grant become private price controls that no headline-price tracker reads, and the 4 corpus companies that consolidated and then devalued did so at a median 68 days. The boundary condition is that this is a two-directional lever, not a stealth-increase story — the single largest move in the corpus is n8n growing an allowance 46-91x at an unchanged price — so the claim is about where price now moves, not which way it moves. The open risk is measurement: a corpus that tracks stickers is blind to both directions.
Evidence over time
17 supporting · 4 counter — hover or tap a point for detail, click to jump to the row.
Evidence
| Company | Date | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Poe | Jul 2026 | $19.99/mo Premium held its sticker ($199.99/year unchanged) while the bundled allowance fell 1,000,000 to 660,000 compute points/month (-34%), confirmed in the plan product data on poe.com/subscription_plans. Because points map to model cost, that is an effective ~51% increase in price-per-point on Poe's most popular plan. The other four paid tiers (10K points/day at $4.99, 1.65M/mo at $49.99, 3.3M/mo at $99.99, 8.25M/mo at $249.99) were untouched. Poe's /pricing URL now 404s; the live rate card lives at /subscription_plans. |
| Ideogram | Jul 2026 | Every dollar price flat (Free $0, Plus $15, Pro $42, Team $20/user annual) while Ideogram 4.0 entered the consumer credit matrix quoted per SINGLE image at the same 2/4/6 credits (Turbo/Balanced/Quality) that 3.0 charges per FOUR images. A Plus subscriber's 1,000 monthly credits go from ~2,000 images on 3.0 Turbo to ~500 on 4.0 Turbo — a 4x devaluation delivered entirely through the burn table, 52 days after the four-tier grid was set on 2026-05-31. |
| HeyGen | Jul 2026 | Subscription prices unchanged (Free $0, Creator $29, Pro $49-$4,300, Business $149 + $20/seat) while Video Agent moved 20 to 30 credits/min standard (+50%) and 90 credits/min in Seedance mode, inside a credit-usage schedule that grew from 12 to 16 rows. 68 days after the 2026-05-15 cutover to a single credit currency spanning avatars, dubbing and video. HeyGen's marketing FAQ still quoted the old 20 credits/min figure at capture, so its two first-party surfaces disagreed. |
| Composio | Jul 2026 | Pro stays $29/mo while its included tool calls drop 200,000 to 50,000 (-75%) and overage rises $0.299/1K to $4.00/1K (13x), effective 2026-08-15 with existing customers grandfathered through 2026-12-31. The $229 mid-tier is retired in favour of a $599 Business tier, and the single tool-call meter is replaced by six dimensions — the clearest case in the corpus of an allowance cut and a meter split shipping as one move. |
| Playground | Jul 2026 | Free tier squeezed rather than removed: downloads 10 to 2/day and the PGv3 rolling generation cap 10 to 5 images per 3 hours, with Pro $15 and Pro Plus $45 unchanged and the shared 3/150/ 1,000-credit pool untouched. 55 days after the 2026-06-04 unification of per-model edits into one credit pool. Free's own plan card still advertises "up to 10 images every 3 hours" — an unresolved live-page contradiction. |
| Vellum | Jul 2026 | Allowance cut for new buyers only: new-customer Custom storage now tops out at 120 GiB (+$30/mo) where 250 GiB and 500 GiB tiers previously existed, with those grandfathered to existing subscribers. Base storage rose 4 to 6 GiB in the same change, and three named presets (Mighty $30, Super $100, Ultra $200) replaced the bare configurator — so the ceiling moved down while the floor moved down in price too. |
| Apollo | Aug 2025 | The corpus's earliest completed arc and its cleanest: between the 2025-05-08 and 2025-08-11 Wayback snapshots Apollo held every seat price ($0/$49/$79/$119 annual) and roughly halved included credits — Basic 60,000 to 30,000, Professional 120,000 to 48,000, Organization 180,000 to 72,000 per user per year. 95 days after the unified credit pool went live. Apollo's own FAQ calls it a "new credit system", auto-applied to new customers and rolled out gradually to existing ones, so two buyers on the identical $79 seat carry different included capacity. |
| n8n | Jul 2026 | The opposite direction at the same sticker, and the largest magnitude in the corpus: "AI Workflow Builder credits" renamed "AI Assistant credits (preview)" and scaled 50 to 2,300/month on Starter (46x) and 150 to up to 13,700 on Pro (91x, FAQ-pinned at 5,700 or 13,700 by plan size). Prices unchanged at Starter $20, Pro $50, Business $800/mo annual. The FAQ is explicit that credits cannot be purchased and do not roll over, making the allowance an upgrade lever rather than a revenue meter; Enterprise lost its old 1,000-credit line entirely. |
| Roboflow | Jul 2026 | Core held at $79/mo billed annually ($99 monthly) while included credits doubled 180 to 360/year — and the included allotment stopped being fixed. The plan card gained a dropdown selling 600 (+$120/mo), 1,200 (+$280/mo) and 2,400 (+$590/mo) credits/year that raises the subscription fee directly, badged with 15-20% per-credit discounts. Seats stayed $29/user/mo, prepaid credits $4, Flex overage $6. |
| Apify | Jul 2026 | Per-Actor RAM ceilings doubled on every tier — Free 8 to 16 GB, Starter/Creator 32 to 64 GB, Scale 128 to 256 GB, Business 256 to 512 GB — at unchanged $0/$29/$199/$999 prices, with compute-unit rates ($0.2 down to $0.13/CU), concurrency limits and proxy/storage/transfer rates all held. A capacity entitlement, not a credit grant, moved as the lever. |
| Socket | Jul 2026 | Free plan's tracked-dependency cap raised 1,000 to 10,000 (10x) with Team $25/dev/mo and Business $50/dev/mo list prices unchanged, confirmed across 2026-06 and 2026-07 Wayback captures because the live page sits behind a Cloudflare wall. The entitlement that defines who needs to pay moved by an order of magnitude with no price event. |
| LlamaIndex | Jul 2026 | Seat entitlements flattened to 100 users on Free, Starter AND Pro (plan cards previously 1/5/ 10; compare table 1/10/25) at unchanged $0/$50/$500 prices, unchanged 10K/40K/400K credits and an unchanged $1.25 per 1,000 credits. Seats stopped being a differentiator between paid self-serve tiers entirely — an allowance move that deletes a whole pricing axis. |
| Juicebox | Jul 2026 | Both levers pulled toward the buyer at once: Growth held at $199/seat/mo ($179 yearly) while bundled credits rose 1,000 to 1,500 contact and 1,000 to 1,500 export credits per seat (+50%), and Starter fell 14% to $119 ($99 yearly) while doubling to 500/500 credits and losing its 3-active-project cap. Business's export limit rose 1,500 to 2,250/seat/mo. |
| Firecrawl | Jul 2026 | Added a flat +1,000 search credits/month to EVERY tier — Free, Hobby, Standard, Growth, Scale and custom Enterprise — as its own line under each plan's headline credit pool, identical regardless of plan size, with the 2-credits-per-10-results Search rate unchanged. A bundled entitlement used instead of a price move or a new meter. |
| Exa | Jul 2026 | Free-tier allowance grown twice in a month and its gate removed: signup credit $10 to $20, recurring monthly credit $7 to $10, and the payment-method requirement for the monthly credit dropped so every Free Tier account now receives it (docs last modified 2026-07-24). The fixed "20,000 requests/month" framing was retired in favour of pure dollar credits. Paid endpoint rates unchanged (Search $7/1k, Deep Search $12-15, Contents $1/1k pages, Monitors $15, Answer $5). It had already expanded the free tier on 2026-07-14. |
| Sarvam AI | Jul 2026 | Every per-unit API rate held flat — LLM inference Rs 4/Rs 2.5/Rs 16 per 1M tokens, STT Rs 30-45 /hour, TTS Rs 15-30 per 10K characters — while the prepaid bonus moved instead: Pro Rs 1,000 to Rs 2,000 bonus (11,000 to 12,000 credits) and Business Rs 7,500 to Rs 12,500 (57,500 to 62,500 credits). The Most Popular badge moved from Pro to the Rs 50,000 Business tier in the same pass. |
| Kaiber | Jul 2026 | The price ladder untouched ($10/$29/$99 monthly, $8/$23/$79 annual) but credit LIFESPAN flipped: the Help Center now states credits "don't expire and roll over month to month", reversing use-it-or-lose-it cycle forfeiture. Rollover is the third distinct allowance variable in this cluster after grant size and burn rate, and the only one that changes an allowance's value without changing its number. |
Counterexamples
- VEED · Jul 2026 — Did it the old way — moved the sticker and left the allowance alone. Creator $10 to $12, Pro $21 to $22, Studio $35 to $39 per user/mo yearly (Creator +20% on the monthly figure, +27% annual), with AI-credit allowances explicitly untouched at 6,000/30,000/180,000 per year and a live A/B variant at $24. Proof that the headline is still available as a lever when a vendor wants the increase to be visible.
- Zhipu · Jul 2026 — Also moved the sticker — GLM Coding Plan roughly $10/$30/$80 to $18/$72/$160 per month with a billing-term discount ladder (monthly -10%, quarterly -20%, yearly -30%) — and then went the reverse of the disclosure direction by replacing absolute quotas ("~80 prompts per 5 hours") with relative ones ("Pro = 5x Lite usage, Max = 20x Lite"). If the allowance is expressed as a multiple of another plan, it cannot be devalued observably at all.
- Freepik / Magnific · Jul 2026 — Moved both levers together and in the same direction, which is the allowance-neutral case: Premium+ $39 to $45 (+15%) and Pro $250 to $280 (+12%) against credit allotments rising 540K to 600K and 3.6M to 4M per year (+11% each). The entry Essential $9 tier was deleted and a $69/seat Business plan with a 1.08M pooled allowance added.
- Relevance AI · Sep 2025 — Consolidated and then did NOT devalue — it re-fragmented instead. Rather than cutting what one credit buys, Relevance split the single credit meter into Actions (a flat charge per tool run) and pass-through Vendor Credits (raw model cost at wholesale, zero markup), sunset the $599 Business plan, raised prices, and made Vendor Credits roll over indefinitely. 302 days from the 2024-11-10 top-up repackaging — the slowest arc in the corpus and the only one that ended in more meters rather than a smaller allowance. Verified at $80 per 1,000 Actions and $20 per 10,000 Vendor Credits on 2026-06-02.
Trivia
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Poe cut its $19.99/mo Premium allowance 34% (1,000,000 to 660,000 compute points) on 2026-07-28 with the sticker untouched — and that was the second cut, not the first. The free tier's daily allowance had already fallen roughly 90% (~3,000 to ~300 points/day) around 2026-03-30, unannounced, with the date and magnitude documented only by three unaffiliated third parties after Poe's own FAQ stopped stating a daily figure. Two allowance cuts exactly 120 days apart and zero price changes.
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The four companies that completed the consolidate-then-devalue arc did it on a strikingly consistent clock: 52 days at Ideogram (grid set 2026-05-31, devalued 2026-07-22), 55 at Playground (2026-06-04 to 2026-07-29), 68 at HeyGen (credit cutover 2026-05-15, burn table raised 2026-07-22) and 95 at Apollo (2025-05-08 to 2025-08-11). Ideogram's is the subtlest: on 2026-07-22 it kept the same 2/4/6 credit numbers but moved them from per-FOUR-images to per-SINGLE-image, so a Plus subscriber's 1,000 monthly credits fell from roughly 2,000 images to about 500 with every dollar price flat.
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The largest allowance move in the corpus runs the buyer's way, six days before the largest cut: n8n scaled Starter's AI credits 50 to 2,300/month (46x) and Pro's 150 to up to 13,700 (91x) on 2026-07-22 at unchanged $20/$50 prices — and made the allowance un-buyable, so the only route to more is a tier upgrade. Roboflow went further and collapsed the plan/meter distinction outright on 2026-07-21: its $79/mo Core card gained an in-card dropdown selling 600, 1,200 or 2,400 credits/year for +$120, +$280 or +$590 per month, making the subscription fee itself a function of the included allotment.