How credits work
SubX credits are the Subscriber Exchange's own currency. They are not money, they are not a wallet balance, and they cannot be bought. They exist for one purpose: to let the members who give the exchange its inventory — the hosts — take a little more reach out of it than everyone else.
The rule the whole design turns on is short:
Every credit in circulation was created by a channel carrying somebody's ad for a full 24 hours. Every credit spent buys an extra placement for somebody's campaign. Because credits can only be earned by supplying inventory, the pool can never be drained faster than it is filled.
If you only ever want to read one page about credits, read this one. The two flows have their own pages:
- Earning credits by hosting — how credits arrive, at what rate, and what stops them arriving.
- Spending credits on extra placements — how credits turn into more reach for your own ad.
What a credit is, in plain terms
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Are credits money? | No. They have no cash value, they are never converted to your Onflow Ads wallet balance, and they cannot be withdrawn. |
| Can I buy credits? | No. There is no purchase path. Money buys delivery boosts instead, which are a separate rail — see Delivery boosts. |
| Can I transfer credits to a friend? | No. Credits belong to the account that earned them. |
| Do credits run out over time? | No. Nothing in the exchange removes credits from your balance except you spending them. |
| Do credits work in Paid Promotions, Cross-Promotion or Boost? | No. SubX credits are spendable inside the Subscriber Exchange only. Boost credit is a different thing entirely. |
The two sides of the balance
Credits in
| Event | What you earn |
|---|---|
| A placement your channel hosted ran its full 24 hours | The base award of 10 credits, multiplied by your plan's credit rate |
| A member you invited enrols their first channel | A one-time bonus of 100 credits to each of you |
Your plan's credit rate runs from 1.0 on Free up to 2.0 on Ultimate, so a single completed placement is worth 10 credits on Free and 20 on Ultimate. The full table is on Earning credits by hosting.
Credits out
| Event | What it costs |
|---|---|
| Adding one extra placement to a broadcast campaign | 25 credits |
That is the only thing credits buy. There is no other spend path anywhere in the exchange.
One completed placement hosted earns 10 credits on the Free plan; one extra placement costs 25. So roughly two-and-a-half ads carried earns one extra ad placed — and faster than that on a paid plan, where the same hosting earns more.
The ledger — why a balance is never an argument
Your credit balance is not a simple counter that gets nudged up and down. Every movement writes a ledger entry: the amount, the reason, the resulting balance, and the placement or campaign it belongs to. The running balance on your account is a cached total of those entries.
Two things follow from that, and both are in your favour:
- A disputed balance is a lookup, not a debate. If a balance ever looks wrong, support can reconstruct it from the entries rather than guess.
- Nothing is ever paid twice. Each hosted placement can mint its award exactly once, even if the system re-checks that placement after a restart. The same protection covers refunds: a campaign whose credits have already been returned can never be refunded a second time.
Where you can see your balance
The exchange spends and earns credits for you automatically, so most members never need to look the number up. Where it does surface:
- When you enrol a channel as an invited member. The confirmation reads: "your channel joined the exchange — you and the member who invited you each earned 100 SubX credits!"
- When you ask for more extra placements than you can afford. The exchange refuses the submission and tells you the exact numbers — what the extras cost, what you hold, and what one hosted ad earns you at your plan.
- Through the Developer API. On Elite plans and above, the
stateaction returns your entitlements, including your credit balance, what one extra placement costs, and how many extra placements your balance could currently afford. See Developer API.
What credits cannot do
This is the part that makes hosts willing to host at all, so it is worth being blunt about.
Credits buy capacity for your own campaign. They do not buy anything from anyone else. Specifically, no number of credits will:
- Push a campaign past the absolute ceiling of 24 placements per cycle.
- Exceed your plan's own cap on extra placements (which is 0 on the Free plan).
- Place an ad in a channel whose owner set a lower content level.
- Place an ad in a channel whose owner refused it, or declined it in review.
- Get around a channel's weekly limit, or the 20-hour gap between placements.
- Restore reach lost to a low reliability score — the reliability haircut is applied to your whole placement count, credit-bought extras included.
- Apply to a swap. A swap is a single 1:1 trade with no placement count, so credits have nothing to buy there.
If your reliability score has pulled your reach down to 75% or 50%, that haircut applies to the base placements and the credit-bought extras together. Buying extras while your reliability is low gets you less than the sticker number. Rebuild the score first — see Rules and fair play.
Common questions
Do I need credits to run an ad at all?
No. Every plan, including Free, runs its included placements per cycle with no credits at all. Credits only ever add placements on top.
I'm on the Free plan and I've earned lots of credits. Can I spend them?
Not on extra placements — the Free plan's cap for extra placements is 0, and the exchange says so plainly: "Extra drops are part of a paid plan. Hosting ads earns the credits that pay for them." Your balance keeps accumulating and becomes spendable the moment you move to a paid plan.
I hosted an ad but my balance didn't move. Why?
A placement only pays when it runs its full 24 hours. A placement that was refused, declined in review, skipped, or removed early earns nothing. See Earning credits by hosting for the full list.
Are credits and Boost credit the same thing?
No. SubX credits are earned by hosting and spent on extra exchange placements. Boost credit is a separate balance used by the Boost product — it is what the Ultimate Delivery Floor make-good pays out in. They never mix.
Next: Earning credits by hosting — the rate for each plan, what pays, what does not, and the referral bonus.