How Ad Credits Work in Winning Ads

Written By Wilco

Last updated 3 days ago

To keep things fair and sustainable (since generating high-quality AI ads costs real resources), Winning Ads runs on a credit-based system.

This guide explains exactly how credits work, where to find them, and how to avoid running into surprises.

💡 What Are Ad Credits?

Each time you generate an ad or use the AI to edit an ad, it uses 1 credit.

  • ✅ 1 credit = 1 ad variation (text + optional image)

  • ✅ 1 credit = 1 AI-powered edit to an ad or image

  • ❌ Manual text edits (done by hand) are free

📌 Important: You can still browse and use your existing ads even when you're out of credits — but you can’t generate or edit new ones until you get more.

🧾 Types of Credits

There are two types of ad credits:

🟢 Monthly Credits

  • 🔄 Automatically reset every month on your reset date (e.g. September 6)

  • 🚫 Do not roll over to the next month — use them or lose them

  • 💬 These are included in your subscription

🟣 Lifetime Credits

  • ✅ Never expire

  • 💡 Great for topping up if you need more than your monthly allowance

  • 🛒 Not currently available in-app — contact support@winningads.com to purchase

🧮 Which Credits Get Used First?

When you generate or edit an ad:

  1. Monthly credits will always be used first

  2. If you’re out of monthly credits, lifetime credits will be used

❗ What Happens If I Run Out?

  • Ad generation will be blocked until you get more credits

  • You’ll still have full access to your account and can:

    • View existing projects

    • Browse and reuse previous ads

    • Manually edit existing text (no credit required)

Need more credits? Just contact us here, and we’ll help you add a lifetime top-up.

👥 What If I Have a Team?

All users within the same account share a single credit pool.

Example: If your agency account has 1,000 credits and a teammate uses 100, you’ll have 900 left — no matter who spent them.

📍 Where to See Your Credits

At any time, you can view your available credits by going into your Profile settings in the top right corner of your dashboard:

  • Then click the Usage tab to see a detailed breakdown, including:

    • Monthly credits

    • Lifetime credits

    • Reset date

Why am I charged credits for every generation and edit?

We often get asked: "Why do I have to pay for an edit?" or "Can I only be charged for the ads I actually decide to use?"

We completely understand this question. We would love to offer unlimited free edits or only deduct credits for the final "winning" ad you download. However, the reality of high-end AI makes that impossible right now. Here is why:

1. Quality Requires Sophisticated (and Expensive) AI Our goal isn't just to make "an ad"—it's to help you make the best ad possible, because mediocre ads simply don't convert. To achieve this, we don't just use a simple script; we run multiple sophisticated AI models behind the scenes to analyze your strategy and generate complex visuals.

2. Every Click Costs Real Computing Power Because these models are so advanced, every single action—whether it is generating a new batch of ads or making a small edit to an image—costs us a significant amount in server processing fees. We pay these costs to the AI providers regardless of whether you end up using the final image or not.

3. The Economic Reality If we only charged for the ads you kept, we would unfortunately lose money on every user. Our margins are currently quite thin because we are prioritizing quality over using cheaper, lower-quality models.

Looking to the Future We are hopeful that as AI technology advances, the costs of processing will drop. If that happens, we plan to pass those savings on to you and become much more flexible with our credit system. But for now, this model allows us to keep providing you with the most powerful ad-creation tools available.