How story app credits work

Coins, gems, diamonds, hearts, tickets, keys, tokens, Anlas, Ink, Taleys, bobbins and spools. The names change, the structure does not: you buy a currency in fixed packs, and the service decides later what it is worth. That gap between buying and spending is the whole design, because it is where the price of a story becomes invisible. This guide shows how to make it visible again, and the rest of our guides cover the surrounding mechanics.

What a credit actually is

It is a licence, not money. Satinaire's terms call coins a virtual currency called "coins" that can be used to unlock chapters and other in-app content, and the Tapas terms are more explicit about the limits: such currencies have no "real world" value, but may be exchanged by you for designated items. Wattpad's payment policy goes further and states that its coins are not virtual currency, while making purchases with them non-refundable.

Two consequences follow. You cannot cash a balance out, and the balance is only as useful as the catalogue it buys. Our glossary entry on credit-based reading covers the terminology in short form.

The one sum worth doing

Take the pack price, divide by the number of units, and you have the unit price. Everything else about a coin economy follows from that number, and it is the only figure a store listing gives you honestly. Here is what it produces across the services whose packs print counts. The last column is our arithmetic, not a published figure.

Service	Currency	Smallest pack	Largest pack	Our unit price, small to large
Dreame	Coins	300 for $2.99	2,500 for $24.99	1.00 cent throughout
GoodNovel	Coins	200 for $1.99	5,000 for $49.99	1.00 cent throughout
Webnovel	Coins	50 for $0.99	5,000 for $99.99	2.00 cents throughout
Roma: Romance Novels	Coins	500 for $4.99	6,000 for $39.99	1.00 down to 0.67 cents
Wattpad	Coins	9 for $0.99	244 for $8.99	11.0 down to 3.7 cents
Dorian	Hearts	14 for $1.99	860 for $99.99	14.2 down to 11.6 cents
Scripts	Diamonds	10 for $0.99	600 for $39.99	9.9 down to 6.7 cents
Talefy	Taleys	165 for $1.99	855 for $10.99	1.21 up to 1.29 cents
DreamGen	Credits	750 for $5.39	9,000 for $51.79	0.72 down to 0.58 cents

Three patterns come out of that table and they are worth more than any single price. The serial reading apps hold a flat rate, so the pack you choose makes no difference at all: a Dreame or GoodNovel coin is a cent whichever pack you tap, and a Webnovel coin is two cents. The game-shaped apps discount modestly with size, between roughly 18% for Dorian and 33% for Scripts. And a few services do something unusual. Wattpad's smallest pack costs about three times per coin what its largest does, which makes the 9-coin pack the most expensive way to read anything on the service. Talefy runs the other way: buying its largest pack costs slightly more per Taley than buying its smallest, so bulk is a mild penalty.

The number nobody publishes

We looked for the coin cost of a chapter in every record we hold. It is published nowhere. Forty services name a currency, and the field recording what a chapter costs in it is empty in all forty. GoodNovel's listing says coins can be earned by in-app tasks but not how many a chapter needs. Dreame's about page explains the model and not the price. Roma's own FAQ says premium chapters can be unlocked with tokens, which you can earn through daily rewards or purchase, with no rate attached.

This is why a pack price tells you almost nothing on its own, and why the honest answer to "is this app expensive?" before you install it is that nobody outside the company can say. The arithmetic becomes possible the moment you are inside the app and can see a chapter's price, and that is the moment to do it, before you buy a second pack. If you want the model-level comparison instead, subscriptions against credits works the break-even point out.

The one service that lets you price a chapter

StoryLoom is the exception that proves how rare publication is. Its pricing page sells a spool for $5.99 and defines it: one spool buys one full-length story of seven chapters with narration, or two stories you only read. Its Standard plan at $9.99 a month gives two spools, described as four stories if never narrated. On our arithmetic a narrated story works out at about 86 cents a chapter bought singly, and a read-only story on the Standard plan at about 36 cents a chapter. Those numbers exist only because the service published both halves of the sum. It is also the only service we found whose own pricing page says its units expire one year after purchase.

Packs that can be priced, and packs that cannot

Look at any in-app purchase list and you will find two kinds of item. One prints a count: "250 gems", "60 diamonds", "1,200 Coins". The other does not: "Piggy Bank Pack II", "Special Bonus Bundle", "gift package 1", "vday.999". Only the first kind can be checked. Whispers lists four items with gem counts and six without, two of them named like internal build strings. The Chapters list mixes diamond and ticket counts with a DayPass, a VIP item and three gift bundles whose contents are stated nowhere.

So the printed count is the thing to look for, and an unnamed bundle is a purchase you are making without knowing the quantity. Two further cautions come straight from the listings. Apple shows at most ten purchase items, so the visible list may not be the whole price list, and Google Play shows only a price range per item rather than the items themselves. The listings also contradict themselves: Dorian prints both 51 hearts and 100 hearts at $6.99.

Credits you do not pay for

Most of these services hand out some of the currency. Choices grants diamonds for finishing a chapter the first time, for watching diamond-rewarding adverts, for tasks in its rewards tab and through an offer wall. Dorian's sapphires are earned by logging in daily, winning events or found in giveaways. GoodNovel's store text points at in-app tasks, Roma at daily check-ins and streaks, and Satinaire at rewarded adverts that unlock chapters. Love Island: The Game starts you with a handful of Gems and adds more for playing daily, watching adverts or completing quests.

Earned currency is not always the same currency. Dorian is explicit that hearts support creators and sapphires do not, which is a difference in who gets paid rather than in what you can unlock.

Which credits expire

One rule works in your favour. Apple's guideline 3.1.1 states that any credits or in-game currencies purchased via in-app purchase may not expire, and requires a restore mechanism. That covers an in-app purchase on an iPhone and nothing else, so everything bought on a website or earned inside an app follows the service's own terms. Those terms vary a great deal.

• Wattpad: purchased coins never expire, but bonus coins do. Coins from a free trial expire when the trial does, and other bonus coins 30 days after they arrive.
• NovelAI: purchased Anlas do not expire, while subscription Anlas refill only to the tier amount and are reset to zero when the subscription ends, including when it is cancelled early.
• AI Dungeon: its pricing FAQ says monthly credits refresh each billing cycle, do not expire and accumulate.
• DreamPress AI: daily free credits reset each day, Pro's 1,000 monthly credits do not roll over, and credits bought in a pack never expire and are spent last.
• Erota: 15 free daily credits expire at the end of the day and do not accumulate.
• DreamGen: monthly credits reset once a month, and extra daily credits are only used after the monthly ones run out.
• Sudowrite: unused credits roll over for 12 months on its Max plan only.

Credits in AI story services are a different unit

In a reading app a credit buys a chapter someone wrote. In an AI service it buys a generation, which makes the arithmetic better and the prediction worse. Erota publishes its rates: a story costs 1 credit on the Apprentice model, 2 on Artisan and 4 on Master, and listening costs 8 credits per story in standard quality or 16 in HD. Its Premium plan at $9.90 a month carries 200 monthly credits, so on our arithmetic a credit is about 5 cents, a Master story about 20 cents and an HD listen about 79 cents. DreamPress AI prices images at 3 credits each and a narration replay at 1 credit on its free tier.

Sudowrite is the honest warning for the category. Its documentation says there is no fixed relationship between credits and words, and that 1 million credits of the Professional plan might allow you to generate anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000 AI words in a month. A tenfold range is not a price. More of this sits on the AI stories section.

Doing the sum before you buy

1. Open a pack list and ignore anything without a printed count.
2. Divide price by units for the smallest and the largest pack. If the two match, pack size is irrelevant and you can buy the smallest.
3. Find a chapter's price inside the app, then multiply by your unit price. That is the real cost per chapter.
4. Multiply that by the number of chapters in a book you would actually finish. A serial can run to hundreds.
5. Compare the result with the monthly plan, if the service has one, and with the weekly plan times 52.
6. Buy on the website if the service has one and it is cheaper there, then check whose expiry rules now apply.