Credit Metering

Generative work has real marginal cost, and products increasingly say so in the interface. Video-generation tools normalized this earliest — credits, queues, and priority tiers as first-class UI rather than billing-page fine print.

Why it works. Visible cost sets expectations before disappointment: users choose draft-vs-final quality deliberately, and “expensive” operations earn the patience they need.

Steal: show estimated cost at the point of action, not in a settings page. Skip: metering trivial interactions — cost UI on cheap actions reads as nickel-and-diming and suppresses exploration.

Flow captures for this entry are in progress — screenshots land with the teardown that covers it. Entries never ship images we didn't capture ourselves.