A Usage Meter for Lyfify AI, and a Free Month of Basic
Hosted AI no longer shows credit amounts. Plans show a usage meter instead, larger jobs draw more usage than small ones, and the first monthly Basic checkout can include a free month.
Written by Simon Gravgaard · 4 min read
The credit counter is gone
Every hosted AI button used to carry a price. Smart Add cost one credit from pasted text and five from a photo. A deep Smart Fill cost five. A counter sat in the header and ticked down as you used them.
Visible prices on every button made people use less AI than they were paying for. You open a grocery list, see the cost chip, and decide the list is fine as it is.
Credit amounts are now gone from the app.
What you see instead
The chip in the header shows your plan name. Plus and Max carry a small gold crown.
Billing has a usage bar. It fills as you use hosted AI through the month, changes colour as you approach the top, and says when it refreshes. There is no count in it. No "47 of 200", no bonus chips, no per-action prices anywhere in Cookbook.
The pool behind the bar is the same size it was. Same plans, same prices.
Larger jobs draw more usage
Smart Fill used to cost the same whether your cookbook held ten recipes or a thousand. Filling a week from ten recipes is a small job. Filling it from a thousand is a large one.
Usage now scales with the size of the job. Smart Fill scales with how many recipes you have. Smart Sort scales with how long your list is. Smart Add, Adapt Recipe, and Estimate Nutrition stay flat.
With an average cookbook, a fill now draws a little less than it used to. With a very large one, it draws more. A How Usage Scales section at the bottom of Pricing lists which features work this way.
A free month of Basic
The first monthly Basic checkout can include 30 days free. A card is required. After the month, Basic continues as a subscription unless you cancel before the first charge.
It is one trial per Google account, and one trial per cookbook on a device, so signing in with a new account on the same cookbook does not start another. Plus, Max, and yearly Basic do not include a trial. Links, photos, and the smarter fills still need Plus or Max.
Plans measured against Basic
The Pricing table used to open with a row called "AI credits each month", reading 0, 50, 200, and 500 across the four plans. Every feature row carried a small coin and a number beside its name.
Those counts are gone, along with the per-feature coins. Plans are now measured against each other. Basic is the base amount. Plus is four times it. Max is ten times it.
A cooldown on repeat runs
Smart Sort and Estimate Nutrition now have a short cooldown. Once you have run one, the button is unavailable for a few minutes on a list or recipe you have not changed, and it tells you why when you tap it. Edit the input and it unlocks straight away.
AI still only starts when you start it. Nothing is queued and nothing reruns on its own. The cooldown is there so a second tap cannot draw on your pool to hand back the answer you already have.
Terms and privacy
The Terms and Privacy Policy are updated to match.
Withdrawal is the part worth reading. If you subscribe and change your mind, you have 14 days, and that right ends once you use hosted AI on the plan, including during the trial. The old wording talked about spending credits, which no longer describes anything in the app.
Privacy also covers two stored values that are not your recipes. For Smart Sort and Estimate Nutrition, Lyfify keeps a short checksum of what you last submitted, so the app can tell an edited list from a repeated one. If you start Checkout for a Basic trial, it keeps a one-way hash of a random local cookbook id so a second Google account on the same device cannot open another trial. Neither value can be turned back into your recipes. Recipes, plans, and lists stay on your device, and in your Drive if you sign in.
Cookbook is still free
Recipes, meal plans, grocery lists, Cook Mode, Discover, and sync cost nothing. AI is the paid part.
The meter is in Billing. If you have never tried the AI, start a free month of Basic from Pricing. If something reads wrong, or the scaling makes a feature feel expensive, email me at [email protected].