credits issue

[white cove]

so im a free tier user and havent used warp in several months so i should have max credits
i send one singular prompt and then it suddenly cuts off halfway through saying im out of credits

so as a free tier user i dont have enough credits to finish one prompt?
this service is useless

[lofty finch]

Hi @white cove. I'm kapa.ai, your friendly support bot. I will try to answer your question by searching through the knowledge base. :wave:

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That's a frustrating experience, and you're not alone — several other users have reported similar issues where credits were unexpectedly depleted or the limit was hit much faster than expected. [free 150 prompts]

A few things worth knowing:

Why a single prompt can consume many credits

Credits are not "one credit per message." They scale based on:

• The model used (larger/reasoning models consume far more)
• The number of tool calls the Agent makes (file searches, reads, diffs, etc.)
• The amount of context passed to the model
• Prompt cache misses (if you haven't used Warp in months, there would be no cached context, meaning the full prompt is processed fresh)

So a single complex prompt can consume a significant number of credits. [Credits]

On the Free plan, once you hit your monthly credit limit, AI access stops until your next billing cycle. [Credits]

What you can do:

1. Check your actual credit balance in Settings > Billing and usage to confirm how many credits were used.
2. Try a lighter model — smaller, faster models consume significantly fewer credits than larger ones like Claude Opus or GPT-5.
3. Keep prompts well-scoped — break large tasks into smaller steps to reduce per-interaction credit usage.
4. If you believe there's a billing error (e.g., credits dropped unexpectedly with no real usage), email [email protected] — Warp has handled similar account-specific issues that way. [credits dropped to 0]

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Note: you can ask me a follow up question by @ mentioning me again :speech_balloon:

@white cove Kapa.ai is still learning and improving, please let me know how I did by reacting below.

[white cove]

also i was using the auto model so it should have at least used a less expensive model if it knew my prompt would magically delete all my credits without any control on my part
i didnt even get anything useful out of the prompt because it spend all my credits on reading the 3 project files (which are all relatively small) and doing several google searches

no point having a free tier if it cant even be used

[charred frigate]

please avoid tagging folks directly. Project files being loaded into context can take up the credits depending on how large the project can be. afaik the free plan defaults to 75 credits after the 3rd month so that is a low amount that may be consumed quickl when using the Auto (genius) model in particular. The Auto (cost-efficent) model uses less expensive models so that may get you further on Free, but still 75 credits is low. We had to lower the credits on Free as there were many folks trying to abuse the system.