Where the meter stops: what happens when AI coding credits run out mid-task

An agent is eight calls into something that was going well, and the balance runs out. What happens next is a product decision that almost nobody checks before they need it.

This post covers what five documented tools do at that point, what the unfinished task has already cost, and why the check has to happen before the model generates.

Five things a tool can do at zero

Each of these is documented by the vendor doing it.

Hard stop

The tool refuses further work until the window resets, you upgrade, or you buy more. Anthropic's help centre puts it in one sentence: if you hit your usage limit, you will need to wait for it to reset, upgrade your plan, or purchase usage credits. It is the most honest of the five and the most annoying, because the reset runs on the vendor's clock rather than on your deadline.

Silent degrade

The tool keeps answering, on a weaker model. GitHub documents that if you use all of your premium requests, you can still use Copilot with one of the included models for the rest of the month. Nothing stops, but the same prompt now gets a weaker model's answer, and the change was a billing event.

Overage

The allowance ends and metered pricing begins, usually behind a budget you set in advance. Anthropic describes usage credits as a way to switch to consumption-based pricing at standard API rates instead of being blocked, and GitHub prices additional premium requests at four cents each. It is the only one of the five that leaves the running task unharmed.

Billed for the wreckage

Work that produced nothing usable is charged anyway, because the tokens were really spent. Linear's documentation says it plainly: failed runs, retries, or partial completions are billable for the resources used. That is what metering means, and it is why the moment a task dies matters more than a pricing page can tell you.

Interrupt and restart

The tool blocks on a question about your balance and loses the job it was running. A Codex CLI issue from November 2025 describes a low-credit picker that steals the terminal's focus, and notes that even after selecting an option, the original command restarts from scratch, wasting minutes in longer jobs. It was closed as not planned. This is the expensive one.

Where the money actually sits in a task

Take the same task the previous post priced: find why this test fails and fix it, which the agent turns into twelve model calls. It starts at 12,000 input tokens, every step adds 3,100 tokens of tool output and previous reply, and every step generates 600 tokens back. The whole thing costs 115,380 credits on Claude Sonnet 5.5.

What matters is what it has cost so far when it gets killed, and that is not proportional to how far it got, because each call carries everything before it. Which balance you were spending decides how often you hit that moment (a later post sorts free credits by whether the grant returns), and the reset windows decide how long the gap lasts. On a request-counted quota such as Gemini CLI's, the abandoned steps are spent either way.

Halfway through the steps you are only a third of the way through the money. Two thirds of the way through the steps, at step 8, you have spent 53.8% of it. That share is almost a property of the task rather than of the model: across all fourteen models we price it sits between 53% and 55%, because context growth affects every price list the same way.

And the worst place to be interrupted is where interruptions cluster: a task runs out of budget late, when the calls are big. The last four calls of this task cost almost as much as the first eight.

What the restart costs

A restart is not a resume. The second attempt begins with an empty conversation and re-reads the same files, re-runs the same commands and re-sends every token the first attempt already paid for.

On Claude Sonnet 5.5: the abandoned attempt cost 62,040 credits, the clean run costs 115,380, and doing both costs 177,420. So an interruption at step 8, followed by a successful second attempt, prices the task at 1.54 times what it should have cost. Across the whole catalogue that multiplier lands between 1.53 and 1.55, from the cheapest model to the most expensive.

So a tool that keeps your conversation on disk, so you can top up and continue, saves real money: you pay once plus one resend instead of 1.54 times.

Why the check has to happen before the tokens

Metering is inherently retrospective. You learn what a call cost when the model has finished generating and told you how many tokens it used. Any wallet enforced from that number alone is enforced one call too late, and somebody has to absorb the difference: the user through a negative balance, or the platform through a write-off.

Linear's documentation notes that balances are not updated in exact real time, so a workspace may briefly go slightly negative. A pre-authorization step exists to avoid that.

What Clixad's gateway does before each call, in this order:

1. Ask what the wallet can afford, ignoring whatever max_tokens the client asked for. Otherwise a deliberately short request would read as "out of credits" and a long one as affordable.
2. Convert the balance into an output-token allowance and send it to the provider as the ceiling for that call, so generation physically stops at what the balance covers instead of overrunning it.
3. Refuse anything that cannot fund a usable reply. The floor is 512 output tokens. Below that the call would truncate mid-sentence and still cost a full round trip, so it is not started.
4. Meter the real usage afterwards and debit it, clamped to the balance as a last resort. The clamp exists so the user's balance cannot be driven negative by a provider that overran the ceiling. When that happens, the platform eats it.

Concretely, on the task above: to start call 8, which carries 33,700 input tokens, a wallet needs 10,878 credits on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and 284 credits on GPT-5 Nano. Below that the call is refused with a 402 and nothing is generated or charged. A wallet one credit short of that line buys no output tokens at all at that point in the conversation, and it is better to be told so than to receive half a sentence.

Topping up in the middle

Clixad's answer to an empty wallet is a rewarded offerwall completion rather than a card, so the top-up is free but slow.

From our own ledger: completed offers on our CPX wall have credited from 9,000 to 114,000 credits on completion, with a median of 51,000: 26 completions recorded in our ledger between 27 July 2026 and 12 September 2026, as of 14 September 2026. The largest paid more than twelve times the smallest, and the ledger does not record how long an offer took.

Being screened out is the normal case, not an error. The most common outcome of starting a survey is that it ends part way through and pays nothing or a small bonus, because you did not match the panel being bought.

Against the table above, one completion at the median covers a little under half of this task on Claude Sonnet 5.5, or nine whole runs of it on Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite. A free account can earn at most 500,000 credits a day across every offerwall we run.

Five questions before a long task

You can answer all five from a tool's own documentation.

1. Which of the five behaviours does it implement at zero? A stop, a degrade and an overage are three different products, and the second is the only one that will not tell you it happened.
2. Is the running task preserved? Interrupt-and-restart costs about half a task again. Interrupt-and-resume costs one resend.
3. Does anything cap a single call? If the answer is only a monthly budget, the enforcement is after the fact and someone is absorbing the overshoot.
4. What does the tool charge for a run that produced nothing? The honest answer is "the tokens it spent", and a vendor who says otherwise is either refunding out of goodwill or not metering.
5. How long is the wait? A five-hour window and a weekly window are different products for the same money.

What Clixad does at zero, and what it does not fix

Clixad is a terminal coding agent funded by rewarded offerwall completions, a sponsored line in the terminal and one-time credit packs rather than a subscription. At zero it does one of the five things above: it stops, per call, before generating. You get a 402 and a balance, not a truncated answer and a bill. Credits are metered at a published rate of 100,000 credits to $1 of list value, and the price of a turn is visible before you spend it.

What it does not fix: an interrupted task is still an interrupted task. Your conversation is saved on your own disk and you can top up and continue rather than starting over, so you pay one resend instead of the 1.54 multiplier. You still pay that resend. And earning the credits back means completing an advertiser action that may screen you out, which costs time.

The daily cap is the other limit. On Claude Opus 5.5 the most a free account can draw in a day is two tasks of the kind priced here, and not a third.

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