App builder credits buy the work the agent does, not the messages you send.
App builder credits are prepaid units of agent work. They are not a message count: a quick question can use a fraction of a credit, while a first build of a new app or a long fix can use dozens, because every step the agent takes is charged. That means reading your project, writing the code, building the app and checking that it runs. In Newly the balance belongs to your organization rather than to you, a plan is $25 a month, there is no free plan, and a new account starts at zero. How the meter runs is most of the answer to whether a builder is worth paying for.
Below: what a credit is and who it belongs to, why two similar prompts cost different amounts, what you see the moment the balance hits zero, and the two store fees credits never pay. Every product detail here was read from Newly's own billing documentation on 3 October 2026.
See what makes a turn expensiveThe short version
A credit is a unit of work, and work is not evenly sized.
Every other software price you have met is per seat, per month or per request, and all three are predictable. Effort-based credits are none of those. The same five words cost whatever the work behind them costs, which is why the question people actually arrive with is not what a credit costs but why one message cost so much more than the last one.
The useful mental model: you are not buying answers, you are buying effort, and effort is measured by how much reading, writing, building and retrying the answer took. Anything that makes the agent do more of those costs more. Everything on this page follows from that.
What a credit is, and who it belongs to
A credit is prepaid usage that belongs to the organization, not to a single person, so everyone working in your projects spends from one shared balance and a teammate's long afternoon is your afternoon too. You need a positive balance to create a project, to send the agent a message and to create a Newly Backend. A new account starts at zero and there is no free plan, so picking a plan or a top-up is the first thing that happens after you sign in. If you work in a project someone shared with you, the project owner's organization pays for your turns.
This page does not print how many credits a plan includes, and that is deliberate rather than coy. The documentation states a figure. The public pricing page builds its credit figures from a live call to the billing service, so what it shows is whatever that service returns today, and the two have not always agreed. The documentation itself says prices can change and that Billing in the app always shows the current ones. Read the number in Billing, or on the pricing page, at the moment you are about to pay. A figure printed in an article, this one included, is a figure somebody wrote down weeks ago.
That vagueness is not special to one vendor. You can quote a seat and you can quote a server, but nobody can quote a unit of thinking in advance, which is why an honest account of vibe coding costs comes as a range and a set of drivers rather than a price list. The drivers are the part you can actually control.
Why two prompts cost different amounts
Because the charge tracks work, and two messages of the same length can mean wildly different amounts of work. "Make the save button blue" is one file read and one edit. "The save button does nothing" is an investigation: the agent reads the screen, follows the handler, reads the data layer, changes something, builds the app, runs it, finds it still broken and goes round again. The second message is charged for all of that, and neither of you knew which one you had sent until it finished.
The documentation names the factors plainly. How much the agent has to read, write and build. The size of your project and of the conversation so far, which is why a message late in a long chat costs more than the same message in a fresh one. Attached images and screenshots. And repeated build-and-fix loops, which are the most expensive item on the list: when a build fails or the app crashes, the agent starts a fix turn on its own, and that turn is charged like any other. In Remote chats it stops after the same build failure happens three times in a row and explains the problem instead of looping forever.
Modes do not change the rate. Build, Plan and Ask are all charged by the work done in the turn, and Ask is not a discount; it usually costs less only because answering a question involves less work than changing code. Closing the browser tab does not stop the meter either, because a Remote chat keeps working in the cloud without you. Pressing Stop does, and the work completed up to that point stays saved.
The practical reading of all this is that spend is a proxy for elapsed agent work, so an estimate of what a feature will cost is really an estimate of ai app development time. The cheapest turn is the one that says what to change and where. The most expensive is a symptom with no location attached, sent into a long chat on a large project.
Try it
What made that turn expensive
Tick what was true of the message you just sent. These are the factors Newly's own documentation names, in no particular order of weight.
Nothing ticked. A specific, single change on a short chat is about as cheap as a turn gets.
What happens when you run out
The run stops and your work is kept. The chat shows "You're out of credits, so this run stopped here. Everything so far is saved", with a Buy more credits link that opens Billing. Add credits, go back to the same chat and send another message; the agent picks up from the saved state of your project rather than starting again. An error mentioning 402 is the same condition: out of credits, or a usage limit.
Two details catch people out. Only an owner or admin of the organization can buy credits, and being an Admin on a project is a different permission that carries no billing rights at all, so a member just sees a message telling them to ask an owner. And there is no spending cap: no setting that stops the agent at a number you choose. The balance in the account footer is the only brake, and it moves in jumps rather than smoothly, because credits are set aside while a step runs and settled when it finishes. The last step of a turn can take the balance slightly below zero, and the next credits you buy cover that first.
Not everything that stops the agent is a credit problem, and some people reach for their card when nothing is wrong with their balance. A single turn can run for up to one hour, then stops with its work saved and a message asking you to continue. An idle Remote chat parks after about fifteen minutes and your next message wakes it. By default only three Remote chats can be starting or running at once across an organization, and a fourth waits or saves your prompt as a draft. None of those limits cost anything. They just look like running out.
What credits genuinely cannot buy is a way onto a phone. Newly uploads your iOS build to App Store Connect and TestFlight, but Apple requires an Apple Developer Program membership first, and Apple's enrollment page, read on 3 October 2026, puts the annual fee at 99 USD, in local currency where available. Enroll through the Apple Developer app and it is an auto-renewable subscription that renews until cancelled; accredited educational institutions can enroll with a fee waiver. Newly also does not press Submit for review, because an app produced by a generation service has to be submitted by the person whose app it is. The Apple account is yours, and its bill arrives whether or not you spent a credit that month.
Working out what a month actually costs
Budget three lines, not one. The plan or the top-ups, which is the only line that moves with how much you build. Apple's yearly membership, if you are shipping to iPhone. And Google's developer registration, which Google Play Console Help, read on 3 October 2026, describes as a US$25 one-time registration fee paid by credit or debit card when you set the account up, alongside the identity verifications Play now requires. One platform charges every year and one charges once. That asymmetry is small money and useful knowledge: it means an Android-only launch has no recurring store cost at all.
Inside the plan line, the shape of the credits matters as much as the amount. Plan credits expire at the end of each monthly allowance and do not roll over, so a quiet month is money you do not get back. Top-up credits last twelve months from purchase, are spent only after your plan credits, and cost a little more per credit than plan credits, with Billing showing the exact price before you pay. Annual billing is 20 percent cheaper than paying monthly, and the credits still arrive month by month and still expire month by month.
What does not draw down credits today is worth stating plainly, because it is where most of the compute actually goes: previews and cloud simulators, native builds, TestFlight uploads, Newly Backend hosting, and Undo and Restore to here. You still need a positive balance to create a project or a Backend, but leaving a simulator running costs nothing. Restoring to an earlier message is free, which makes it strictly cheaper than several messages spent talking the agent back out of a change.
None of this adds up to the price of an app. Credits and store fees are only the metered part. Design, content, a real device to test on, an App Store listing and the hours you put in yourself are the rest, and what an app costs overall is a larger and more awkward sum than any monthly plan.
What you pay for, who charges it, and whether credits cover it
| What you pay for | Who charges it | How often | Paid with credits | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agent turns in Build, Plan, Ask or Design | Newly | every turn | Yes | effort-based credits |
| Automatic fix turns after a failed build | Newly | every retry | Yes | effort-based credits |
| Cloud simulators, native builds, TestFlight uploads | Newly | not metered today | No | no extra charge |
| Apple Developer Program membership | Apple | every year | No | 99 USD a year |
| Google Play developer registration | once | No | US$25 one time |
Deciding whether the meter suits the way you work
The question worth asking before you pay is not what a credit costs. It is whether the work you have in mind lands in one or two turns or whether it loops. Small, specific, one-change-at-a-time requests on a tidy project are cheap. A vague symptom on a large project with screenshots attached and a build that keeps failing is not, and the gap between those two is wider than the gap between any two plans.
Newly is an AI app builder: you describe an app in plain English, it writes a real React Native and TypeScript project that you own, runs it on cloud iOS and Android simulators while it builds, then uploads to TestFlight and publishes to Google Play internal testing. Apps start local-first, keeping their data on the phone with no accounts and no server, and the agent adds Newly Backend only when the app needs sign-in, shared data, syncing or payments. It is $25 a month on effort-based credits, with no free plan, and the credit figure is the one number to read in Billing rather than here.
The honest weak spot, since this page is about spending money: there is no per-message or per-chat cost history. You cannot look back at a chat and see which prompt was the expensive one. Until that exists, the only feedback loop available is checking the balance in the account footer before and after a turn you were unsure about, which is a crude instrument for a meter that can swing this widely between two messages.
Questions people ask about credits
Prepaid units of agent work. A credit is spent on what the agent does to answer you: reading your project, writing code, building the app and checking that it runs. In Newly the balance belongs to your organization, so everyone in your projects spends from the same pool, and you need a positive balance before you can create a project or send the agent a message.
Work out your first month before you buy
Decide which stores you are shipping to, add Apple's yearly membership or Google's one-time registration to the plan price, then read the current credit figure in Billing rather than in an article.
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