How the balance works
One credit buys one minute of transcribed audio. Every job debits the minutes it used when it finishes, so the balance always reflects what is left rather than what has been bought.
The 60 minutes granted at signup are ordinary credits: they sit in the same balance, they are spent the same way, and they never expire. There is no window in which the free minutes have to be used.
What costs more
Two things change the rate. Diarization – speaker labels – is billed at 3 credits per minute, because it runs a second model over the whole recording to work out who spoke when.
Everything else is the standard rate. The free export formats (TXT, Markdown, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT, and JSON) are generated in your browser and cost nothing extra on top of the transcription itself.
Topping up
Buy credits when you need them; pricing carries the current packs and rates. A purchase also unlocks the paid features permanently – speaker labels, whole-feed podcast batches, and word-level export come with any credit purchase rather than a monthly fee.
Auto-reload keeps a balance from running dry. You set a threshold and a target: when the balance dips below the threshold, Pepys charges the card on file and reloads up to the target. That matters most for unattended work such as a folder that transcribes on its own or an integration calling the API, where nobody is watching for a zero balance. If a reload fails, the billing page flags it so you can update the card.
Where to see it
Your balance, your purchase history, and the auto-reload setting all live in the billing area of the app. A job that cannot be started for lack of credits says so rather than failing silently, and the same is true on the API, where an empty balance returns 402 – see errors and limits.