How Soclo credits work

Soclo has one shared credit wallet. The website, content, campaigns and Autopilot all draw from the same visible balance — there is no separate pot per feature and nothing reserved that you cannot spend elsewhere. Understanding where the free line falls is the difference between a cheap month and a confusing one.

The line that matters: making versus doing

Credits pay for generation. Everything else is just using the app.

This is why the Free plan is genuinely usable rather than a teaser. It is an ongoing plan with 0 included credits — not a countdown trial — so you can connect everything and publish your own work indefinitely, and add credits only when you want the app to produce something for you.

Standard and Premium pictures Rolling out this week

Rolling out this weekChoosing between Standard and Premium for a picture arrives in the days after launch. Tonight pictures are made at one standard, and the price is shown before anything is made, exactly as it is below.

Pictures will come at two standards, and you choose which one you are paying for before it is made.

• Standard is the everyday one. It is right for most posts — a picture of the thing, in your brand, good enough that nobody thinks about it.
• Premium costs more and is worth it where the picture is the argument: a hero shot of the product, the image at the top of your website, the advert somebody is paying to show people.

The app shows you the price of the one you have chosen before it makes anything, so the decision is made with the number in front of you rather than afterwards. If you are generating a week of routine posts, Standard is the right default; save Premium for the two or three pictures a month that actually carry something.

Video works the same way, with a quality setting on Autopilot — Standard, Better or Best. Better looks sharper and costs more, and the app says so rather than hiding the trade-off.

What the plans include

Every paid tier can also be billed yearly, and the saving is not the same on each. Starter is £79.99 a year and Pro £199.99 — ten months’ price for twelve, about 17 per cent. Business at £479.99 and Autonomy at £959.99 are a full 20 per cent off, so the discount actually improves on the larger plans. If you already know you will use Soclo for a year, that is the cheapest way to buy the same thing.

You can change plan up or down at any time. On the web, changes are prorated to the day; subscriptions billed through the App Store or Google Play are changed in your store account.

Buying credits without a subscription

Top-up packs are one-off purchases, and the app is explicit that they never expire. That is what makes the Free plan genuinely workable: no recurring commitment, and credits that sit there until you use them.

The real saving is a subscription. Pro at £19.99 for 800 credits works out at 2.50p a credit, and Autonomy at £99.99 for 6,000 is 1.67p — before the yearly discount, which takes Autonomy to about 1.33p. That is roughly a third of the price of topping up.

So packs are for trying the generation features, or covering a month busier than usual. Once you know roughly what you spend each month, a plan is substantially cheaper for the same work.

Prices above are the UK ones; your own currency is shown at the point of purchase. Different kinds of work cost different amounts — a caption and a piece of video are not the same job — so the balance in the app is always the authoritative figure.

Credits you do not have to buy Rolling out this week

Two ways, both opening in the days after launch. Every account gets an invite code: when somebody you invited starts a paid plan, you both get free credits. And Soclo hands out free-credit codes, redeemed in the same Have a code? box. Inviting a friend covers both, including what happens if your friend cancels.

How to stop wasting them

Almost all wasted credits come from the same place: generating repeatedly because the first result was not close enough. These are the things that actually reduce that.

1. Fill in the Brand Kit before you generate anything. This is the highest-return ten minutes in the app. Without it, the model is guessing at your tone and you will burn several attempts pulling it back. With it, the first draft starts far closer and needs editing rather than replacing.
2. Say what it is for, not just what it is about. "Announce the Saturday opening and get people to book a table" produces something usable. "Write a post about the restaurant" produces something you will throw away.
3. Edit the near-miss instead of regenerating. A draft that is eighty per cent right is finished faster by hand than by another full generation, and editing costs nothing. Regenerating rolls the dice again and may land further away.
4. Generate once, adapt for each destination. The whole point of one post reaching several places is that you are not paying to produce the same idea repeatedly.
5. Batch your thinking, not just your posting. Deciding the month's angles in one sitting means each generation has a clear brief. Generating with no plan is how you end up producing and discarding.
6. Put a cap on anything automated. If you let Autopilot handle routine work, set the credit cap deliberately rather than leaving it at whatever it defaults to.

The website and the same wallet

Soclo Pages is an add-on inside Soclo rather than a separate product with separate billing, so a website draws on the same credits as everything else. The published model is 120 credits to activate a soclo.site website and 120 credits a month to keep it live.

That pricing is fixed, but renewal charging is not switched on, so nothing is being charged to keep a site live at the moment. The editor itself is open to everybody — building and editing your website covers it. Check the product updates page for the current position before planning around it.

Choosing a plan honestly

Start on Free and buy a small pack. Because top-up credits never expire, there is no rush to use them and no penalty for buying the smallest one first. Spend it on real work for a few weeks, look at what you actually used, and pick the plan that covers that with a little room. Choosing a tier before you know your own consumption means guessing, and the guess is usually too high.

Once you do know, switch to a subscription — the per-credit rate is much better than top-ups — and take the yearly option if you are confident you will still be using it in six months.

If you want a wider frame for that decision, the blog covers how much a small business should spend on marketing — including why share-of-revenue rules tend to mislead.

Where to go next

If you have not connected anything yet, start with connecting your accounts and publishing, which costs nothing and proves the setup works. New to the app entirely? Getting started with Soclo covers the first hour.