Credits pay for the AI, not for using your site

A recurring question from people evaluating Zitegen: "if I run out of credits, do I lose access to my site?" No. We get why the question comes up — a lot of AI tools meter the whole product behind a credit balance. Ours doesn't.

What's always unlocked

• The visual canvas and style panel — move things, restyle things, no credits spent.
• The Monaco code editor and full file tree, on every plan including free.
• A full source download of your generated Astro project, any time.
• Publishing and custom domains.

What actually costs a credit

Only AI calls: generating a new site from a description, asking chat to add or rewrite a section, or running the AI SEO assist. That's it. If you'd rather hand-write every section yourself and never touch AI generation again after your first prompt, you can do that indefinitely on a free plan.

Why we drew the line here

Metering access instead of usage punishes exactly the people who've finished getting value from the AI and moved into polishing their own site — the opposite of what a credit system should do. Credits exist to price the expensive part, the model calls, not to gate the parts that don't cost us anything marginal to serve.

If you're deciding between plans, the honest framing is: pick based on how often you expect to prompt the AI, not on whether you're worried about losing your editor.