Sell AI Credits on Your Own Website

The Model: Buy Wholesale, Sell Retail

StudioUI’s credit system is built as a two-sided price sheet:

• Your wholesale side. You buy generation credits from StudioUI from a tenth of a cent each ($1 = 1,000 credits), in one-time packs — no subscription. Each generation costs a published number of credits (an image from 50 credits, a GIF 150, a music track 250, a video clip 450, a chat message 5).
• Your retail side. You decide what a generation costs your members — per credit, per pack, or bundled into a membership tier. StudioUI never sets your prices and never takes a percentage of what you charge.

The difference is your margin, and a built-in reporting dashboard shows revenue, wholesale cost, gross margin and ARPU per day, week or month, so you always know your real unit economics.

A Worked Example (Illustrative)

Say a standard image generation costs you 100 credits — about $0.10 at the $1 = 1,000-credit rate. If you charge members $0.25 per image, you keep roughly $0.15 per generation. A community of 50 members generating 40 images a month is 2,000 generations: about $500 of member revenue against about $200 of wholesale cost. The exact numbers are yours to set — the point is that the spread exists, it’s transparent, and every knob (your price, your pack sizes, your tiers) is under your control. The pricing page has an interactive calculator where you can drag the sliders on your own assumptions.

Charge Users for AI Generations, Not Just Access

Most membership sites monetise with a flat monthly fee and then eat whatever usage costs come with it. Credits are the healthier shape for AI, because usage varies wildly between users:

• Light users pay only for what they generate — a low barrier that converts far better than another $29/mo subscription.
• Heavy users self-fund their own consumption instead of being subsidised by everyone else.
• You never sell usage below cost, because your retail price sits on top of a known wholesale rate.

You can still sell subscriptions if you want — bundle a monthly credit allowance into your existing membership levels and sell top-up packs on the side. Credits are sold through standard WooCommerce products, so they slot into whatever commerce setup you already run.

Turn WordPress Into an AI SaaS

Functionally, this is the SaaS playbook without the SaaS build: metered usage, prepaid billing, per-user accounting and a productised AI feature set — running on a WordPress site you already own. What would normally take a development team (model integrations, job queues, billing, moderation) ships in the plugin:

• Five studios in one — image, video, GIF, music and chat companions, all metered by the same credit balance.
• WooCommerce checkout — your gateway, your currency, your invoices. Any WooCommerce-compatible payment processor works.
• White-label by default — members see your brand, not StudioUI’s. Agencies can productise the whole thing under their own name; see the white-label AI plugin page.
• Hosted compute included — generation runs on StudioUI’s managed GPUs on the Free tier, so you’re not standing up infrastructure to launch. If you later want your own hardware or keys, Pro self-hosting raises your margin further.
• Moderation and safety built in on hosted compute, so an open generation box on your site isn’t an open liability.

If you’re weighing the broader approaches, how to create an AI SaaS with WordPress and how to monetize AI on WordPress cover the landscape; this page is the productised version of that plan.

Launching in Four Steps

1. Install the plugin

Download StudioUI free and activate it — a studio page is created on your site automatically.

2. Connect compute

Link your site to the hosted gateway with a one-time connect code. No API keys, no GPU, about a minute.

3. Set your prices

Buy a wholesale credit pack, then define what generations cost your members. Start simple — one price per modality — and tune with the margin dashboard once real usage flows.

4. Open the doors

Put the studio behind your membership, or sell credit packs to the public through WooCommerce. The step-by-step configuration walkthrough is in how to sell AI credits on WordPress.

Pricing Strategies That Actually Get Used

Sites that make credits work tend to land on one of three shapes, often in combination:

• Pure pay-as-you-go. Sell credit packs outright and let usage find its own level. Simplest to run, easiest to explain, and the default place to start.
• Membership + allowance. Fold a monthly credit allowance into existing membership tiers (a real, costed perk rather than another PDF), and sell top-ups to the members who burn through it.
• Loss-leader onboarding. Grant a small free allowance to new signups so they experience the studio, then convert the ones who keep generating. Because the wholesale cost of a taster allowance is cents, this is a cheap acquisition lever with a measurable payback in the dashboard.

Whichever shape you pick, resist pricing per credit in public — members think in outcomes, not units. “Images from 25¢, music tracks from 60¢” converts better than “credits from $0.00025”, and it leaves you room to adjust the underlying rates without repricing the story.

Who This Works For

• Community and membership sites adding a genuinely new paid feature instead of another content tier.
• Agencies deploying a branded AI studio on client sites and charging for usage — see StudioUI for agencies.
• Creators and educators whose audience already asks “what do you use to make these?” — now the answer lives on your own domain and pays you.
• Niche site owners in verticals where a tuned prompt experience (product shots, thumbnails, meme GIFs, background music) is worth paying for per use.

FAQ

Does StudioUI take a cut of my credit sales?

No. Your members pay through your own WooCommerce gateway and the revenue is yours. StudioUI’s income is the wholesale credits (or a Pro licence) you buy — not a percentage of your retail sales.

Do I need WooCommerce?

For selling credits to members, yes — credits are sold as standard WooCommerce products so any compatible payment gateway works. WooCommerce is free.

What stops a member from over-generating at my expense?

Nothing runs unmetered: every generation deducts from a prepaid balance, and when a member’s credits run out, generation pauses until they top up. Failed jobs are refunded automatically.

Can I change my retail prices later?

Yes, at any time. Wholesale rates are published, your retail prices are yours, and the reporting dashboard makes repricing decisions data-driven rather than guesswork.

Is this allowed — am I “reselling AI”?

Reselling hosted generation as credits is exactly what StudioUI is designed and licensed for. Hosted compute is moderated and subject to the acceptable-use policy, which protects you as the site owner too.