You should only ever pay for work that actually got done. When a credit-consuming task — like drafting an email with AI — fails partway through on our side, the credits spent on that attempt shouldn't just disappear. This release makes refunds for those failures automatic, and makes sure a retry never charges you twice.
Charged only for what completes
When a task fails after credits were already deducted, the system now detects the terminal failure and credits the amount back to your balance on its own. There's nothing to claim and no support ticket to file — the refund happens as part of handling the failure, and you'll see it land in your usage feed as a green credit entry.
No double-charging on retries
The trickier half of this is retries. Many failures are transient, so the work gets attempted again automatically — and a naive refund could collide with a charge that was actually fine, clawing back money it shouldn't or paying out twice. The refund logic is now careful about exactly this: it reimburses a genuinely failed attempt without reversing a charge for work that did succeed on a later try. The accounting stays correct whether a task succeeds the first time, succeeds on a retry, or fails for good.
What you'll notice
- Failed generations no longer quietly cost you credits.
- Refunds appear automatically in Billing → Usage, marked as green + entries with a reason.
- Your balance reconciles cleanly even when tasks are retried behind the scenes.
Why it matters
Credits are money, and confidence in a credit system rests entirely on the belief that the number only moves when it should. A single unexplained deduction is enough to make anyone start watching the meter instead of running campaigns. By refunding failures automatically — and being meticulous about not double-counting retries — we keep the balance honest in both directions. You pay for outcomes, not for our hiccups, and you don't have to audit us to know it.
Concretely: if drafting an email reserves credits and that attempt fails outright, the exact amount returns to your balance and shows up as a green entry in your usage feed. If the work then succeeds on a retry, you're charged once for the success and nothing more. The cases that used to be ambiguous — fail-then-succeed, succeed-then-retry — now resolve to the obvious answer. That correctness is the whole game with anything financial: not just refunding generously, but refunding exactly, so the ledger is always something you can trust at a glance.