The allowance, not the price, is the repricing lever
27 of 380 corpus companies repriced by moving what a plan includes — credits, tool calls, RAM ceilings, concurrency, email caps, credit lifespan — while leaving every published dollar figure intact. Corpus-wide, packaging changes outnumber price changes 228 to 121. The sticker is no longer where the price moves.
What's happening — and why
What's happening: vendors are changing the price of their product without changing any number on the pricing page. They do it by moving the allowance — how many credits, tool calls, concurrent runs, gigabytes or emails the plan includes, and how long the credits last.
Why: credit consolidation made it possible. Once many per-feature meters collapse into a single currency, the monthly grant and the burn rate become private price controls that no headline-price tracker reads. A vendor can halve what a plan delivers without editing a dollar sign.
The lever is not one variable but five: the monthly grant, the burn rate, the capacity ceiling, the credit's lifespan, and — the newest — the allowance's very existence. Recraft reached the terminal form on 2026-08-28 by deleting the number entirely: '30 credits per day' became 'Limited free credits' on both its pricing page and its docs, so the grant can now be tuned indefinitely with no observable change anywhere.
Critically this is not a stealth-increase story. It runs both ways — 14 of the 27 moves ran in the buyer's favour, and Composio raised its free tier five-fold in the same window it had announced a cut.
How it works
Evidence over time
29 supporting · 4 counter — hover or tap a point for detail, click to jump to the row.
Evidence
| Company | Date | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Poe | Jul 2026 | $19.99/mo Premium held its sticker ($199.99/year unchanged) while the bundled allowance fell 1,000,000 to 660,000 compute points/month (-34%), confirmed in the plan product data on poe.com/subscription_plans. Because points map to model cost, that is an effective ~51% increase in price-per-point on Poe's most popular plan. The other four paid tiers (10K points/day at $4.99, 1.65M/mo at $49.99, 3.3M/mo at $99.99, 8.25M/mo at $249.99) were untouched. Poe's /pricing URL now 404s; the live rate card lives at /subscription_plans. |
| Ideogram | Jul 2026 | Every dollar price flat (Free $0, Plus $15, Pro $42, Team $20/user annual) while Ideogram 4.0 entered the consumer credit matrix quoted per SINGLE image at the same 2/4/6 credits (Turbo/Balanced/Quality) that 3.0 charges per FOUR images. A Plus subscriber's 1,000 monthly credits go from ~2,000 images on 3.0 Turbo to ~500 on 4.0 Turbo — a 4x devaluation delivered entirely through the burn table, 52 days after the four-tier grid was set on 2026-05-31. |
| HeyGen | Jul 2026 | Subscription prices unchanged (Free $0, Creator $29, Pro $49-$4,300, Business $149 + $20/seat) while Video Agent moved 20 to 30 credits/min standard (+50%) and 90 credits/min in Seedance mode, inside a credit-usage schedule that grew from 12 to 16 rows. 68 days after the 2026-05-15 cutover to a single credit currency spanning avatars, dubbing and video. HeyGen's marketing FAQ still quoted the old 20 credits/min figure at capture, so its two first-party surfaces disagreed. |
| Composio | Jul 2026 | Pro stays $29/mo while its included tool calls drop 200,000 to 50,000 (-75%) and overage rises $0.299/1K to $4.00/1K (13x), effective 2026-08-15 with existing customers grandfathered through 2026-12-31. The $229 mid-tier is retired in favour of a $599 Business tier, and the single tool-call meter is replaced by six dimensions — the clearest case in the corpus of an allowance cut and a meter split shipping as one move. |
| Playground | Jul 2026 | Free tier squeezed rather than removed: downloads 10 to 2/day and the PGv3 rolling generation cap 10 to 5 images per 3 hours, with Pro $15 and Pro Plus $45 unchanged and the shared 3/150/ 1,000-credit pool untouched. 55 days after the 2026-06-04 unification of per-model edits into one credit pool. Free's own plan card still advertises "up to 10 images every 3 hours" — an unresolved live-page contradiction. |
| Vellum | Jul 2026 | Allowance cut for new buyers only: new-customer Custom storage now tops out at 120 GiB (+$30/mo) where 250 GiB and 500 GiB tiers previously existed, with those grandfathered to existing subscribers. Base storage rose 4 to 6 GiB in the same change, and three named presets (Mighty $30, Super $100, Ultra $200) replaced the bare configurator — so the ceiling moved down while the floor moved down in price too. |
| Apollo | Aug 2025 | The corpus's earliest completed arc and its cleanest: between the 2025-05-08 and 2025-08-11 Wayback snapshots Apollo held every seat price ($0/$49/$79/$119 annual) and roughly halved included credits — Basic 60,000 to 30,000, Professional 120,000 to 48,000, Organization 180,000 to 72,000 per user per year. 95 days after the unified credit pool went live. Apollo's own FAQ calls it a "new credit system", auto-applied to new customers and rolled out gradually to existing ones, so two buyers on the identical $79 seat carry different included capacity. |
| n8n | Jul 2026 | The opposite direction at the same sticker, and the largest magnitude in the corpus: "AI Workflow Builder credits" renamed "AI Assistant credits (preview)" and scaled 50 to 2,300/month on Starter (46x) and 150 to up to 13,700 on Pro (91x, FAQ-pinned at 5,700 or 13,700 by plan size). Prices unchanged at Starter $20, Pro $50, Business $800/mo annual. The FAQ is explicit that credits cannot be purchased and do not roll over, making the allowance an upgrade lever rather than a revenue meter; Enterprise lost its old 1,000-credit line entirely. |
| Roboflow | Jul 2026 | Core held at $79/mo billed annually ($99 monthly) while included credits doubled 180 to 360/year — and the included allotment stopped being fixed. The plan card gained a dropdown selling 600 (+$120/mo), 1,200 (+$280/mo) and 2,400 (+$590/mo) credits/year that raises the subscription fee directly, badged with 15-20% per-credit discounts. Seats stayed $29/user/mo, prepaid credits $4, Flex overage $6. |
| Apify | Jul 2026 | Per-Actor RAM ceilings doubled on every tier — Free 8 to 16 GB, Starter/Creator 32 to 64 GB, Scale 128 to 256 GB, Business 256 to 512 GB — at unchanged $0/$29/$199/$999 prices, with compute-unit rates ($0.2 down to $0.13/CU), concurrency limits and proxy/storage/transfer rates all held. A capacity entitlement, not a credit grant, moved as the lever. |
| Socket | Jul 2026 | Free plan's tracked-dependency cap raised 1,000 to 10,000 (10x) with Team $25/dev/mo and Business $50/dev/mo list prices unchanged, confirmed across 2026-06 and 2026-07 Wayback captures because the live page sits behind a Cloudflare wall. The entitlement that defines who needs to pay moved by an order of magnitude with no price event. |
| LlamaIndex | Jul 2026 | Seat entitlements flattened to 100 users on Free, Starter AND Pro (plan cards previously 1/5/ 10; compare table 1/10/25) at unchanged $0/$50/$500 prices, unchanged 10K/40K/400K credits and an unchanged $1.25 per 1,000 credits. Seats stopped being a differentiator between paid self-serve tiers entirely — an allowance move that deletes a whole pricing axis. |
| Juicebox | Jul 2026 | Both levers pulled toward the buyer at once: Growth held at $199/seat/mo ($179 yearly) while bundled credits rose 1,000 to 1,500 contact and 1,000 to 1,500 export credits per seat (+50%), and Starter fell 14% to $119 ($99 yearly) while doubling to 500/500 credits and losing its 3-active-project cap. Business's export limit rose 1,500 to 2,250/seat/mo. |
| Firecrawl | Jul 2026 | Added a flat +1,000 search credits/month to EVERY tier — Free, Hobby, Standard, Growth, Scale and custom Enterprise — as its own line under each plan's headline credit pool, identical regardless of plan size, with the 2-credits-per-10-results Search rate unchanged. A bundled entitlement used instead of a price move or a new meter. |
| Exa | Jul 2026 | Free-tier allowance grown twice in a month and its gate removed: signup credit $10 to $20, recurring monthly credit $7 to $10, and the payment-method requirement for the monthly credit dropped so every Free Tier account now receives it (docs last modified 2026-07-24). The fixed "20,000 requests/month" framing was retired in favour of pure dollar credits. Paid endpoint rates unchanged (Search $7/1k, Deep Search $12-15, Contents $1/1k pages, Monitors $15, Answer $5). It had already expanded the free tier on 2026-07-14. |
| Sarvam AI | Jul 2026 | Every per-unit API rate held flat — LLM inference Rs 4/Rs 2.5/Rs 16 per 1M tokens, STT Rs 30-45 /hour, TTS Rs 15-30 per 10K characters — while the prepaid bonus moved instead: Pro Rs 1,000 to Rs 2,000 bonus (11,000 to 12,000 credits) and Business Rs 7,500 to Rs 12,500 (57,500 to 62,500 credits). The Most Popular badge moved from Pro to the Rs 50,000 Business tier in the same pass. |
| Kaiber | Jul 2026 | The price ladder untouched ($10/$29/$99 monthly, $8/$23/$79 annual) but credit LIFESPAN flipped: the Help Center now states credits "don't expire and roll over month to month", reversing use-it-or-lose-it cycle forfeiture. Rollover is the third distinct allowance variable in this cluster after grant size and burn rate, and the only one that changes an allowance's value without changing its number. |
| Metronome | Aug 2026 | The allowance deleted rather than resized — the first such case in the corpus. From 2026-07-14 through at least 2026-07-22 Metronome's free-to-start Starter card read "$100,000 in billing volume included, billed at 0.8% after that" and "10M events included, billed at $0.04 / 1k events after that". As of 2026-08-04 the same two bullets read "Billing volume billed at 0.8%" and "Events volume billed at $0.04/1k ingest events" — the specific included-volume numbers are gone and the metered rates are byte-identical. The headline copy ("Start free, scale…") is unchanged, so a buyer reading the page today sees the same plan name, the same rates, and no free floor. Twenty-one days from publishing an allowance to withdrawing it. |
| Make | Aug 2026 | The cleanest price-per-unit increase with an unchanged headline in the window. Make collapsed the Core ($9/mo annual) / Pro ($16) / Teams ($29) ladder it had introduced on 2026-06-11 back into a single all-inclusive "Make Plan" at the same $9/mo annual (~$10.59 monthly) — and halved the credit slider's entry step from 10,000 to 5,000 credits/month in the same move. Same sticker, half the credits: an effective doubling of price per credit delivered entirely through the allowance. This is the second flip in three months (single plan in early June, three-tier ladder on 06-11, single plan again on 08-11), and residual copy still on the live page — an FAQ referencing "the Core, Pro, and Teams plans" and an Enterprise card reading "Everything in Teams, plus:" — shows the cleanup was incomplete at capture. |
| FLORA | Aug 2026 | The allowance as a rolling monthly promotion, moved twice in a fortnight at a frozen sticker. FLORA's Special launch offer adds extra included generative usage of $12/seat (Starter), $50/seat (Pro) and $100/seat (Max) per month on top of each seat's base pool. Its deadline had already moved from Jul 1 to Aug 1; after Aug 1 the badge disappeared from the pricing page entirely (confirmed missing on the 08-11, 08-12 and 08-13 recaptures, logged as a price-change on 08-11 because it cut included usage), and on 08-14 the identical offer returned with a new "Applies through Aug 31" deadline. Base seat prices were $18 / $50 / $200 before, during and after, and FLORA still publishes no fixed base usage-pool dollar amount per seat — so the only disclosed component of what a seat includes is the part that keeps switching off and on. |
| Speechmatics | Aug 2026 | Recurring free allowance converted to a one-time grant with every rate held. The Free and Pro plan cards dropped the recurring "3,000 minutes (50 hours) per month" speech-to-text allowance and "1 million characters per month" of text-to-speech, replacing both with "$100 in credit to get started" (1 credit = $1, no card required); spending it and adding a card moves the account to standard pay-as-you-go. Every per-hour STT SKU ($0.129-$0.43/hr), the $0.011/1k-character TTS rate, the bolt-on prices and the 20%/33% discounts are unchanged; the page's "Last updated" badge moved 29 July to 31 July 2026. SambaNova ran the same play without a replacement on 2026-08-14, deleting the "$5 in free API credits, no credit card required" grant and its 30-day-expiry banner so the Free card now reads "Add a payment method and purchase credits to run your first requests" — six-model rate card untouched. |
| CrewAI | Aug 2026 | An allowance cut at both ends of the ladder in one release, with no price event. The plan table's "Deployments" row was renamed "Automations": the free Basic plan went from "Unlimited" deployments (alongside its 50-execution cap) to a hard 2 per month, and Enterprise's "Maximum executions" moved from "Unlimited" to "Custom" — a published ceiling replaced by a negotiated one. This continues CrewAI's 2026 pattern of Enterprise entitlements moving from fixed or unlimited language toward quote-dependent terms, after the earlier removal of the published $0.50/execution overage rate and the swap of 50 bundled developer-hours/month for a 45-day onboarding programme (2026-07-30). |
| Modal | Aug 2026 | The capacity-ceiling form of the lever, running the buyer's way at 5x. Modal's Team plan container concurrency rose from 1,000 to 5,000 with no change to the $250/month plus compute plan fee, the $100/month included credits, GPU concurrency (50), deployed-app limits or log retention. The same release itemised Team-tier controls that had not previously been broken out — custom domains, static IP proxy, deployment rollbacks (3 versions), environment-level budgets and RBAC — and clarified that private Slack support stays Enterprise-only. Vercel made the same move on the same date on a different resource: Sandbox concurrency 2,000 to 10,000 on Pro/Enterprise, and the fixed 200 vCPU/min allocation rate replaced by a dynamic quota ramping to 5,000/min, prices flat. |
| Instantly | Aug 2026 | An allowance increase that only half-shipped, which is itself a disclosure finding. The Outreach Hypergrowth tier's Monthly-billing card now advertises 125,000 emails/month at the unchanged $97/mo price, up from 100,000 at the 2026-06-04 capture — a 25% capacity increase with no price change. But switching the same page to Yearly billing still shows 100,000, and the pricing page's own Compare Features table (visible without a click) also still lists 100,000 for Hypergrowth. A buyer comparing tiers through the comparison table cannot see the higher number at all. |
| Unstructured | Aug 2026 | The clearest single instance of the lever running both ways in one change. Unstructured HALVED its published Pay-As-You-Go rate from $0.03 to $0.015 per page — a real sticker cut — while converting its free allowance from 15,000 pages EVERY MONTH (recurring) to 10,000 pages ONCE at signup, and removing the $3,000/mo bill cap it had added six weeks earlier. A high-volume buyer gains; an evaluation or low-volume buyer loses a recurring 15,000-page grant and gains an uncapped bill. The headline price fell and the effective cost of the common case rose. |
| Apify | Aug 2026 | A capacity-ceiling cut with every dollar figure intact: the Free plan's concurrent Actor runs fell from 25 to 5, an 80% reduction, while Starter (32), Scale (128) and Business (256) concurrency, all subscription prices, and every compute-unit, proxy and storage rate stayed unchanged. A pure allowance move on a single tier, invisible to any tracker reading prices. |
| Metronome | Aug 2026 | Confirms the allowance-EXISTENCE variable this trend added at 380, and confirms it stuck. Metronome's Startup plan no longer includes the free US$100,000 billing-volume / 10-million-event allotment; its 0.8%-of-billing-volume and $0.04-per-1,000-event rates now apply from the first dollar and the first event rather than only as overage. The rates never moved — only the included quantity, which was published on 2026-07-14 and gone by 2026-08-04. |
| Recraft | Aug 2026 | The allowance stops being a NUMBER. Recraft's pricing page and Free-plan docs both dropped the specific "30 credits per day" figure (confirmed present in the 2026-05-31 capture), leaving only "Limited free credits" and "limited credits" respectively, plus non-numeric caps of "up to three images per day" and "up to two images at a time". The grant can now be tuned without any observable change at all — the terminal form of this trend's measurement problem. |
| Composio | Aug 2026 | The lever running the buyer's way at 5x, and against its own announcement. Composio's Free plan went from 20,000 to 100,000 tool calls (plus 50,000 trigger events and 1,000,000 LLM tokens), instead of the announced cut of Pro's included calls from 200K to 50K. Pro stayed $29/mo as prepaid usage credit. An announced entitlement CUT shipped as an entitlement INCREASE. |
Counterexamples
- VEED · Jul 2026 — Did it the old way — moved the sticker and left the allowance alone. Creator $10 to $12, Pro $21 to $22, Studio $35 to $39 per user/mo yearly (Creator +20% on the monthly figure, +27% annual), with AI-credit allowances explicitly untouched at 6,000/30,000/180,000 per year and a live A/B variant at $24. Proof that the headline is still available as a lever when a vendor wants the increase to be visible.
- Zhipu · Jul 2026 — Also moved the sticker — GLM Coding Plan roughly $10/$30/$80 to $18/$72/$160 per month with a billing-term discount ladder (monthly -10%, quarterly -20%, yearly -30%) — and then went the reverse of the disclosure direction by replacing absolute quotas ("~80 prompts per 5 hours") with relative ones ("Pro = 5x Lite usage, Max = 20x Lite"). If the allowance is expressed as a multiple of another plan, it cannot be devalued observably at all.
- Freepik / Magnific · Jul 2026 — Moved both levers together and in the same direction, which is the allowance-neutral case: Premium+ $39 to $45 (+15%) and Pro $250 to $280 (+12%) against credit allotments rising 540K to 600K and 3.6M to 4M per year (+11% each). The entry Essential $9 tier was deleted and a $69/seat Business plan with a 1.08M pooled allowance added.
- Relevance AI · Sep 2025 — Consolidated and then did NOT devalue — it re-fragmented instead. Rather than cutting what one credit buys, Relevance split the single credit meter into Actions (a flat charge per tool run) and pass-through Vendor Credits (raw model cost at wholesale, zero markup), sunset the $599 Business plan, raised prices, and made Vendor Credits roll over indefinitely. 302 days from the 2024-11-10 top-up repackaging — the slowest arc in the corpus and the only one that ended in more meters rather than a smaller allowance. Verified at $80 per 1,000 Actions and $20 per 10,000 Vendor Credits on 2026-06-02.
Trivia
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Poe cut its $19.99/mo Premium allowance 34% (1,000,000 to 660,000 compute points) on 2026-07-28 with the sticker untouched — and that was the second cut, not the first. The free tier's daily allowance had already fallen roughly 90% (~3,000 to ~300 points/day) around 2026-03-30, unannounced, with the date and magnitude documented only by three unaffiliated third parties after Poe's own FAQ stopped stating a daily figure. Two allowance cuts exactly 120 days apart and zero price changes.
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The four companies that completed the consolidate-then-devalue arc did it on a strikingly consistent clock: 52 days at Ideogram (grid set 2026-05-31, devalued 2026-07-22), 55 at Playground (2026-06-04 to 2026-07-29), 68 at HeyGen (credit cutover 2026-05-15, burn table raised 2026-07-22) and 95 at Apollo (2025-05-08 to 2025-08-11). Ideogram's is the subtlest: on 2026-07-22 it kept the same 2/4/6 credit numbers but moved them from per-FOUR-images to per-SINGLE-image, so a Plus subscriber's 1,000 monthly credits fell from roughly 2,000 images to about 500 with every dollar price flat.
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The largest allowance move in the corpus runs the buyer's way, six days before the largest cut: n8n scaled Starter's AI credits 50 to 2,300/month (46x) and Pro's 150 to up to 13,700 (91x) on 2026-07-22 at unchanged $20/$50 prices — and made the allowance un-buyable, so the only route to more is a tier upgrade. Roboflow went further and collapsed the plan/meter distinction outright on 2026-07-21: its $79/mo Core card gained an in-card dropdown selling 600, 1,200 or 2,400 credits/year for +$120, +$280 or +$590 per month, making the subscription fee itself a function of the included allotment.
For buyers
Track entitlements the way you track prices. Snapshot what your plan includes — credit grant, burn rate per action, concurrency ceiling, storage cap, credit expiry — and diff it at renewal, because none of it appears in a price comparison. Two traps in particular: a recurring allowance quietly becoming a one-time grant (Unstructured swapped 15,000 free pages every month for 10,000 once at signup, in the same change that halved its per-page rate to $0.015), and a published allowance becoming an unpublished one (Recraft's deleted daily-credit figure). When a vendor consolidates many meters into one credit currency, ask for the dollars-per-credit and the credits-per-action in writing — the four corpus companies that consolidated and then devalued did so at a median of 68 days.
For vendors
The allowance is the most flexible pricing instrument you have, and the least legible — which is exactly why it needs governance. Moving a grant is operationally cheaper than a price change and provokes far less churn, but it is also the change most likely to be discovered at the worst moment, on an invoice rather than a page. If you cut an allowance, publish the change and the effective date; if you raise one, say so loudly, because 14 of 27 corpus moves ran the buyer's way and almost none got credit for it. Above all, do not delete the number: an unpublished grant converts a pricing decision into a trust problem.
Outlook — what to watch
Expect the lever to keep absorbing repricing while sticker changes stay comparatively rare — the all-time packaging-to-price ratio is 228:121, and the latest fortnight ran 42 to 28. The direction to watch is legibility rather than magnitude. If more vendors follow Recraft and remove the quantity entirely, the allowance becomes unobservable and the corpus loses the ability to measure repricing at all. The counter-move would be a vendor publishing an allowance changelog; none does today.
Bottom line
27 corpus companies changed what a plan includes while leaving every dollar figure untouched, and the ratio of packaging to price changes runs 228 to 121. Budget the allowance, not the sticker — and check whether the allowance is still a published number at all.
FAQ
What is allowance-based repricing?
Changing what a plan includes — the credit grant, the per-action burn rate, a concurrency or storage ceiling, or how long credits last — while leaving the published price unchanged. The effective price per unit of work moves, but no price diff exists to catch it. Apify cut Free-plan concurrent runs from 25 to 5 with every subscription price and every compute, proxy and storage rate untouched.
Does this always mean a price increase?
No, and treating it that way is a mistake. Of 27 dated moves, 14 ran in the buyer's favour. The largest single move in the corpus is n8n growing an allowance 46 to 91 times at an unchanged price, and Composio raised its free tier from 20,000 to 100,000 tool calls in the same window it had announced a cut. The claim is about where price now moves, not which way.
How do I detect it?
Only by snapshotting entitlements, not prices. Record the credit grant, credits-per-action, concurrency and storage ceilings, and credit expiry at purchase, then diff at renewal. A vendor that consolidates several meters into one credit currency deserves particular attention — that consolidation is what makes the grant and the burn rate privately adjustable.
What happens when a vendor stops publishing the allowance?
You lose the ability to detect the change at all. Recraft removed the specific '30 credits per day' figure from its Free plan on both its pricing page and its docs on 2026-08-28, leaving only 'Limited free credits' and non-numeric caps. Metronome went further at the paid end, deleting a US$100,000 billing-volume and 10-million-event included allotment outright so its 0.8% and $0.04-per-1,000-event rates now apply from the first dollar.