Managing AI credits across a team — one wallet, real ceilings

A shared wallet is the right default for a team. It is also the thing that makes finance nervous, because on day one nothing stops the newest contractor from spending a month of credits on takes nobody will use. eroq's answer is not to split the wallet into five little wallets — it is one balance with a ceiling per person on top. Here is how that works, what a refund does to a ceiling, how to budget a team of five, and the seat rule you should read before you invite anyone.

One wallet, not five balances

Credits live on the workspace, not on the accounts inside it. Every member — every API key, every studio session, every render in the video tool — spends from the same pool, and every refund returns to it.

That is a feature, not a compromise. Separate per-person balances mean five top-ups, five moments of running dry at 11pm, and five reconciliations at the end of the month. One pool means one number to watch and one place to fill it.

The balance never rots. Plan credits roll over forever, pack credits never expire, and a failed generation refunds itself automatically, so you reconcile delivered work rather than attempts. One credit is about a cent at the entry pack, which makes the arithmetic below easy to sanity-check in your own currency.

Anyone can read the current state of the wallet with a free call:

curl https://eroq.ai/v1/account \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $EROQ_API_KEY"

{
  "object": "account",
  "credits": 905,
  "usage_30d": { "requests": 412, "credits": 1543 }
}

The seat rule, before anything else

This is the part people get wrong, and it is worth getting right before you plan a team around it.

• A free workspace is 1 seat.
• Every individual plan holds exactly 2 seats — Hobby, Creator and Studio alike. Paying more on the individual tier buys credits, rate-limit headroom and longer clips. It does not buy people.
• Teams live on the business tier — Team holds 25 seats, Agency holds 50, each with one shared wallet.
• Beyond that, it is an Enterprise conversation at [email protected].

So a Studio plan at $149 does not quietly become a five-person account because it is expensive. If there are three of you, the plan you want is Team. The full grid, both billing intervals, is on /pricing, and the seat counter sits above the invite form on /dashboard/workspace so the limit is never a surprise at the moment you type someone's email.

Per-member monthly ceilings

An admin can set a monthly credit ceiling on any member from the Members tab. It is a hard cap on that person's spend from the shared wallet, measured over the calendar month and reset on the 1st.

When a call would cross the ceiling, it is refused before any credits move, with a message naming the numbers — how much of the allowance is used, what the cap is, what this call would have cost. No mystery failures, and nothing charged.

A refunded generation nets out. Refunds are recorded as negative usage in the same month, so a render that failed and refunded itself costs the member nothing against their ceiling. This is the behavior you want: a contractor should not lose a tenth of their monthly allowance because an engine had a bad minute. The same is true of requests the content policy blocks — they return content_blocked, they are never charged, and they never touch the cap.

Leave the ceiling empty and the member simply spends against the shared wallet like everyone else.

Per-member rate-limit shares

The second dial is a share of the workspace's per-minute rate limits, expressed as a percentage. The role sets the starting point — a Creator gets half the allowance by default, a Developer gets all of it — and a per-member override can only narrow that share, never widen it past what the role grants.

Use it when one pipeline must not be starved by another. If a backend integration is serving customers, capping the interactive studio users at a slice of the per-minute allowance keeps a batch of experiments from making production wait.

A share of zero is not a way to block someone, by the way — that is what the Viewer role is for, and the refusal you get from it is clear rather than a stream of timeouts.

Budgeting a team of five

Say five people on the Team plan — $249 a month, 36,000 credits, 25 seats, plenty of room. Two people generate in the studio all day, one engineer runs the API pipeline, one producer approves work, one client watches.

A sane allocation:

• Producer (Admin) — no ceiling. Someone has to be able to finish the job at 6pm on a Friday.
• Two creators (Creator role) — 8,000 credits each, 16,000 total.
• One engineer (Developer role) — 12,000 credits.
• One client (Viewer role) — no ceiling needed, because a Viewer cannot spend a credit at all.

Capped spend totals 28,000, leaving 8,000 credits of headroom in the wallet for the producer and for the month that goes sideways. Ceilings should always sum to less than the monthly grant; that gap is the whole point.

What 8,000 credits actually buys one creator, using the roster prices on /models:

• 80 clips of 5 seconds on Motion One at 100 credits each, or
• 23 clips of 10 seconds on Seedance 2.5 at 340 credits each, or
• 800 images at 10 credits each, or
• a mix — which is what really happens.

And 12,000 credits for the engineer buys 200 five-second drafts on Seedance 1.0 Lite at 60 credits, which is a healthy amount of pipeline testing. Voice is cheap enough to ignore in a video budget until it isn't — Voice One is 3 credits per 100 characters, so a 600-character voice-over is 18 credits, and a hundred of them is 1,800.

Two adjustments worth making after the first month: raise the ceiling of whoever hit theirs first and was right to, and lower the one nobody came close to. Ceilings are a budgeting instrument, not a punishment, and the usage log tells you which is which.

When the wallet runs dry

Two things happen. Generation calls answer with an insufficient-credits error naming the cost and the balance — again, before anything is charged. And, because running dry mid-campaign is a real event rather than a moral failing, the workspace becomes eligible for a bonus offer on credit packs for a limited window. It appears as a countdown banner when it applies; there is nothing to redeem by hand.

Packs are the right instrument for a spike — Starter $10 for 1,000 credits, Builder $50 for 5,500, Scale $100 for 12,000 — and the plan is the right instrument for a baseline. If you are running a steady monthly volume, the plan is cheaper per credit and it also raises rate limits, clip length and engine access. The grid that lets you compare the two is on /pricing, and the reasoning behind flat credits is in credit pricing for AI APIs.

FAQ

Does a refunded generation still count against a member's monthly ceiling?

No. Refunds are recorded as negative usage in the same month, so they cancel the original charge against the cap. A failed render, or one blocked by the content policy, costs the member neither credits nor allowance.

How many people can share one eroq workspace?

A free workspace holds 1 seat and every individual plan holds exactly 2 — Hobby, Creator and Studio included. Team holds 25 seats and Agency 50, both on one shared wallet, with Enterprise beyond that.

Can I stop a teammate from spending credits without removing them?

Yes, two ways. Give them the Viewer role, which can read the library and usage but cannot spend at all, or leave their role alone and set a monthly credit ceiling that fits the engagement.

Set the ceilings before the campaign starts — the Members tab is at /dashboard/workspace, and the plan grid is on /faq.