Secret Chat AI is usage-based: you hold credits, and sending a message spends some. There's no per-model subscription to maintain, which is much of the point of using an AI aggregator in the first place. This is one of the features of the app; for current prices see pricing.
The free daily quota
Every user gets a daily allowance at no cost, on four models and on the AI Council:
- ChatGPT — free in its Smart Agentic and Fast Chat modes, where every answer is written by GPT Luna, ChatGPT's fast model. It's the app's default model, so you're on the free quota from your first message. A request that needs more (deeper reasoning, research, a picture or a file) asks for credits instead of being answered, and live web search is a paid mode.
- Gemini — free the same way, on its fast model, Gemini Flash-Lite. Claude and Grok are not part of the free quota.
- AI Council (Duet) — a two-model council runs free within the daily quota. Two models from different companies answer the same question in parallel and a referee compares them claim by claim, exactly as on the paid panels; the free pair is a lighter one that answers from memory rather than searching the web. So you can watch two independent models disagree (and have an answer you were given elsewhere checked) without ever paying.
- DeepSeek USA — free for everyone, including its highest reasoning tier.
- Perplexity — web search with clickable sources, also on the free quota.
The allowance resets daily at 00:00 UTC. Nothing about the app itself is gated behind payment — projects, threads, instructions, export and import and privacy reports all work on the free quota. The paid models, the bigger councils and voice transcription are what credits buy.
Credits
A credit is a unit of model usage. What a message costs depends on the model and on how much work it does, so a quick answer from a small model costs a fraction of what a deep-research run on a flagship costs. That's the trade-off usage-based billing gives you: nothing is wasted on a plan you underuse, and an expensive model is available when you actually need one without being paid for monthly.
- One-time credit packs start at $5 and never expire. Buy once, use over months.
- Subscriptions deliver a batch of credits every month at a discount to the one-time price. Subscription credits are use-it-or-lose-it: each new monthly batch replaces the remainder of the previous one, which is what pays for the discount.
- If you hold both, subscription credits are spent first, so the ones with a deadline go before the ones without.
What a council costs
An AI Council spends credits like any other message, and the arithmetic is the obvious one: roughly what asking the same question to each model on the panel separately would cost, plus a small referee step. A Duet is two answers, a Trio three, a Quartet four, so the size you pick is the main thing that moves the price, and where the question needs live web search, each provider charges for its own queries on top of the answer. There's no separate subscription for it: every pack and plan runs councils at the same rate, and the pricing page states roughly how many councils each pack buys.
What you're charged is itemised rather than lumped together. Each answer is priced next to the model that wrote it, with the referee's step on its own line, so a council is also the one place you can compare what the models charge for the same question, and in your usage breakdown that spend files under ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok like any other message on those models, rather than disappearing behind a single "council" line.
Seeing what you have left
The quota display in the app shows your balance, each credit pack you hold, and (under "All LLMs by usage costs") a breakdown of what you actually spent on each model. It also labels each pack, so a subscription batch and a one-time pack are told apart, with the date a subscription batch expires and the date the next one arrives. Subscription cards additionally show how much of the current month's allowance is already gone.
Managing a subscription
- Upgrade to a higher plan, or switch monthly billing to annual, at any time; you pay only the prorated difference and the extra credits arrive immediately.
- Cancel whenever you like. Cancelling is scheduled for the end of the period you have already paid for: nothing already granted is taken away, and an annual plan keeps delivering its monthly batches to the end of the year you bought.
- Resume a cancelled subscription during that remaining window and it simply continues, with no new charge.
- Change the payment method from the account page (or the app's settings). The card itself never touches our servers: the button signs you into the customer portal of Creem, our payment provider, where the card on file is replaced and invoices can be downloaded.
- No surprise charges. We email you 3 days before any renewal charge, so a recurring payment never arrives unannounced.
What billing knows about you
Payment necessarily involves a payment processor, and an account exists so that credits you paid for survive a change of browser. But the accounting is deliberately kept at arm's length from the conversations: usage is recorded as credits spent per model, not as a record of what you asked. Registration stays email-only (no name, no phone number), and that email is used for account access and payment, never to store or associate your queries with you.