The credit equation is published in halves
Vendors that price in a synthetic unit — credit, FlexCredit, LCU, ACU, DBU, compute point — systematically publish only one half of the two-part equation a buyer needs to reach a cost per action, either dollars-per-unit or units-per-action but almost never both, which makes the unit an opacity device rather than the simplification it is sold as. Ten corpus companies publish exactly one half, and the sharpest pairing is a mirror: LangChain prints 1 LCU = $1.50 with no per-action conversion, while Glean prints p50/p90 credit burn for 13 capabilities with no dollar figure anywhere. Six of the ten still carry `price_transparency: public`, which is the point — the synthetic unit is where opacity went after the pricing page stopped being where it lived, and it is invisible to a transparency metric that reads pages rather than equations. Snowflake Cortex and Databricks publish both halves at hyperscaler scale, so this is a disclosure choice rather than a technical limit; if the six-company both-halves cohort keeps growing, the gap closes and this becomes an early-market artefact instead of a structural device.
Evidence over time
10 supporting · 6 counter — hover or tap a point for detail, click to jump to the row.
Evidence
| Company | Date | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| LangChain | Jul 2026 | Collapsed seven per-service meters into two normalized currencies with exact dollar values — 1 LCU = $1.50 (work and compute: Engine, Fleet, deployment runtime, sandboxes) and 1 LSU = $1.00 (traces and storage). The consumption side is published only in infrastructure terms: 0.045 LCU/vCPU-hr runtime compute, 0.006 LCU/GiB-hr runtime memory, 0.177 LSU/vCPU-hr database compute, 0.025 LSU/GiB-hr database memory. The one per-action figure published is a band — an Engine run consumes "roughly 5–30 LCUs" and Engine fires every 6 hours — so a buyer must model vCPU-hours to reach a price, and the band alone spans 6x ($7.50 to $45 per run). Seats held at $0 / $39 / custom. |
| LlamaIndex | Jun 2026 | Prepaid credit bundles at an exact $1.25 per 1,000 credits in both US and EU regions, across Free (10K credits/mo), Starter $50/mo (40K) and Pro $500/mo (400K). The per-parse consumption rate — how many credits a document actually costs to index — is not on the plan card. The dollar half was repriced from $1.00 to $1.25 per 1,000 in February 2026 with included credits trimmed ~20% and headline plan prices held, making each paid plan's price exactly equal to the face value of its included credits. |
| Mintlify | Jun 2026 | Free Starter plan with 5,000 AI credits included and an exact $0.01/credit overage, plus a quoted Enterprise tier and a buyer-settable hard cap. Which action costs how many credits is not published: the assistant, the writing agent and workflows all draw on the same pool with no per-feature rate, so the $0.01 anchor cannot be converted into a cost per documentation page or per assistant query. |
| Qodo | Jun 2026 | Pooled team-wide credits at an exact $0.012 each with no per-seat fee, sold as selectable packs of 2,500 / 5,000 / 20,000. The conversion is published only as an estimate range — the cards label those packs "~18 / ~36 / ~144 reviews per month" — so cost per code review is a band, not a rate, and the pack labels are the only bridge between the dollar rate and the work. Premium-model multipliers exist (Claude Opus at 5 credits, Grok at 4 in the prior seat-based packaging) but no current per-action table is published. |
| Vellum | Jul 2026 | The degenerate dollars-only case: "$1 = 1 credit," passed through to model providers at cost with no markup, so the dollar identity is exact by construction — and precisely because of that Vellum publishes no per-call credit draw. The conversion is whichever provider you routed to at whatever their token price is that week. Vellum monetizes machine tiers (Medium +$35, Large +$60, XL +$125/mo), storage and a $10 platform fee instead, and preset Pro packages bundle credit allowances (Mighty $25, Super $45, Ultra $115). |
| GitLab | Feb 2026 | GitLab Duo Agent Platform went GA with GitLab Credits at a clean $1/credit, with Premium bundling $12 and Ultimate $24 of monthly credits per user for a limited time. No credits-per-agent-action rate is published, so the anchor is unusable for forecasting: a buyer knows the currency's exact value and nothing about how fast an agent spends it. Note GitLab is a counterexample in the sibling trend `the-unit-rate-goes-dark` for the opposite reason — four months later it pulled the $29 Premium seat price behind "Let's talk" while keeping this $1/credit rate published. |
| Glean | Jul 2026 | The mirror image of LangChain, published one day later. Enterprise Flex docs carry a 13-line FlexCredit rate card with p50/p90 consumption per capability — Adaptive Reasoning ~11/~38 standard and ~26/~83 premium, Voice Session ~3/~26, Meeting Notes ~9/~18 per minute, Code Writer ~9/~32, Image Generation ~7/~9, Slide Generation ~45/~142, Deep Research ~33/~144, Agent Run ~7/~114, Advanced Agent Runs ~150/~450 — while `glean.com/pricing` 301-redirects to the homepage and no dollar value for a FlexCredit appears anywhere. It also discloses surface-dependent pricing: a Basic Search Query is 0 credits in-product but 1 FlexCredit via the Client API. Consumption is fully forecastable; cost is not. |
| Jasper | Jul 2026 | Introduced credits on top of seats and published a standalone Rate Card (stamped "Updated 6.9.2026") itemising 10 credits per Grid row, 10 per GEO Hub query or page run, 40 per Research or Translation Agent run, 100 per Optimization Agent run, and 1–40 per API/MCP call — with no dollar per credit published anywhere. The meter exists only on the Business plan, whose seat price is also quote-only, so two of the three variables in a Business bill are sales-gated while the buyer forecasts the third. A footnote makes it worse: Advanced Agent runs bill on top of the 10-credit Grid row cost "in both live Grid runs and Grid test mode," so iteration is billable. |
| Photoroom | Jul 2026 | Published absolute monthly credit pools where relative multipliers used to sit — 8,000 / 25,000 / 75,000 AI credits and 1,000 / 3,000 / 10,000 exports for Pro / Max / Ultra — plus per-feature generation ceilings and a Core-tools-vs-Credit-AI-tools split naming exactly what draws from the pool. The Pro/Max/Ultra dollar amounts render as blank fields on the public page and surface only inside app checkout, a state that dates to January 2025. A FAQ adds that "the monthly credit amount included with your plan may vary depending on your country or region," so even the published half is conditional. |
| Outreach | Jul 2026 | The degenerate case at the other end: three Amplify packages (Core 25,000 AI credits, Plus 50,000, Pro 100,000) with platform caps laddering in lockstep (API calls 250k/500k/1M, custom objects 5/10/20, knowledge 500MB/750MB/1,500MB) and "Request pricing" on every tier. Neither half is published — no dollar per credit and no credit per action — only the pool size, which is the one number that tells a buyer nothing on its own. The page still promises "Per user pricing. No platform fees," so the seat, not the pool, remains the commercial anchor. |
Counterexamples
- Snowflake Cortex · Jul 2026 — Publishes both halves at hyperscaler scale, which proves the two-part equation is publishable. A hard dollar anchor — AI Credits at $2.00 for global cross-region routing and $2.20 for regional (data-residency) routing, edition-independent, alongside Platform Credits at $2 / $3 / $4 by edition — plus a per-function Consumption Table covering AI Functions, Cortex Search, Cortex Agents, Snowflake Intelligence, the Cortex REST API and AI Parse Doc.
- Databricks (Mosaic AI) · Jun 2026 — Same completeness: $0.07/DBU for the Artificial Intelligence product line and $0.65/DBU for Model Training, on a published DBU consumption table — Llama 4 Maverick at 7.143 DBU input / 21.429 output per 1M tokens, Llama 3.1 8B at 2.143 / 6.429, GPT OSS 20B at 1.000 / 4.286, BGE Large embeddings at 1.429. Both halves on one page means the ~$0.50 / $1.50 per 1M token cost is derivable without a sales call.
- HeyGen · Jul 2026 — Publishes both halves, and shows why the pair matters. Business credits are $0.05 each in $5 / 100-credit blocks, and the credit-usage schedule grew from 12 to 16 rows (Custom Expressive Motion 40 credits/min, Precision translation 10 credits/min, Seedance2 60 credits at 720p / 150 at 1080p for any length, VEO3 90 credits, AI Model Training 60 credits per training). Because both halves are public, HeyGen's Video Agent increase from 20 to 30 credits/min reads immediately as a 50% price rise even though no subscription price moved — the legibility a single-half disclosure destroys. Its own marketing FAQ still quotes 20 credits/min, so two first-party surfaces disagree.
- Apollo · Jul 2026 — A `gated` company that nonetheless publishes a complete unit equation: per-endpoint credit rates (1–9 credits per enriched person, +8 if a mobile phone is returned, 1 per page of search results, 0 for create/update/list/manage) alongside a published top-up ladder from $0.025 down to $0.015 per credit. Gated seat pricing did not prevent full disclosure of the unit — so the split in this trend is not a proxy for the transparency field.
- Luma AI · Jul 2026 — Posted absolute per-plan credit totals (Plus 10,000, Pro 40,000, Ultra 150,000) beside unchanged $30 / $90 / $300 plan prices and an expanded per-model credit grid, making the dollar side derivable at ~$0.003/credit. Worth noting the redundancy: the 4x / 15x "usage" multipliers on the same cards are just the credit totals restated against Plus (40,000 is exactly 4x of 10,000), so one of the two published figures adds nothing.
- Poe · Jul 2026 — Publishes both halves and still repriced. $19.99 buys a stated 660,000 compute points, and every bot's in-app "Info" button shows that model's exact per-message point cost before you send — an unusually complete consumer equation. On 2026-07-28 the Premium allowance was nonetheless cut 34%, from 1,000,000 points to 660,000, with the price held; the free tier's daily allowance had already been cut ~90% (from ~3,000/day to ~300/day) on 2026-03-30. The lesson: completing the equation still leaves the pool size unguarded.
Trivia
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Poe is one of the few vendors in this file that publishes BOTH halves — every bot's in-app "Info" button shows that model's exact per-message point cost before you send, and $19.99 buys a stated 660,000 compute points — and on 2026-07-28 it still cut the Premium allowance 34%, from 1,000,000 points to 660,000, with the sticker price untouched. Publishing the equation does not protect the buyer, because the pool size is a third variable that no rate card covers. Jasper's 2026-07-22 rate card sits at the opposite extreme: a 500-row Grid pass is exactly 5,000 credits and no published number converts that into money.
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LangChain (2026-07-21) and Glean (2026-07-22) published opposite halves of the identical equation one day apart. LangChain collapsed seven per-service meters into two currencies — 1 LCU = $1.50 and 1 LSU = $1.00 — then priced consumption only in infrastructure terms (0.045 LCU/vCPU-hr runtime compute, 0.177 LSU/vCPU-hr database compute) plus a 5–30 LCU band for a single Engine run: a 6x spread on a service scheduled to fire every 6 hours. Glean shipped a 13-line rate card down to p50/p90 per capability while `glean.com/pricing` continues to 301-redirect to the homepage and no dollar value for a FlexCredit exists on any surface.
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LlamaIndex (2026-06-10) shows that the unpublished half is the one that moves. It raised the credit from $1.00 to $1.25 per 1,000 and trimmed included credits about 20% (Starter 50K to 40K, Pro 500K to 400K) while holding plan prices at $50 and $500 — a 25% per-unit increase and a ~20% allowance cut with no sticker change, leaving every paid plan's price exactly equal to the face value of its included credits. Qodo (2026-06-30) publishes its missing half as a band rather than a rate: 2,500 credits at $0.012 each is labelled "~18 reviews per month," so cost per review is a range by construction.