exocad AI Credits: what they cost, what's free, and how not to waste them

The first thing to know about exocad's AI credits is that they evaporate. The free ones your license hands you on the first of the month are gone by the last day, used or not. They don't carry forward. That single rule decides whether the credits feel free or feel like money quietly walking out the door.

So skip the feature tour for a minute. The money question is the small arithmetic that decides whether you ever pay for a credit at all. Get it right and labs coast on the free allowance; get it wrong and they top up paid credits they never needed.

How a credit actually gets spent

A credit is what you spend each time you run one of exocad's server-side AI tools. The cost per use is fixed and published. One credit buys an AI crown design. A TruSmile Photo costs two. A TruSmile Video costs ten, because rendering a moving smile is far heavier work than a single still.

The part people forget: the credit is consumed the moment the AI runs, not when you decide you like the result. Run AI crown design, get a first-pass proposal, then reshape half of it by hand, the credit is still spent. Credits aren't "designs that worked." They're "times you asked the AI to try."

What's free, and the no-rollover trap

Every qualifying license comes with a monthly batch of free credits, called License Credits. A Flex license includes 30 a month. A Perpetual license includes 10 a month, and only while an upgrade contract is active. exocad compares it to a phone plan: the allowance resets each month and unused credits don't roll over.

That cuts two ways, and both catch people out.

• The waste trap: a Flex lab that runs AI on five cases this month leaves 25 credits on the table. Next month it doesn't have 55 waiting. It has 30 again. Hoarding is impossible, so the unused ones are simply lost.
• The overspend trap: the lab that hits a heavy week, blows past its free allowance, and starts buying credits without noticing the monthly batch was meant to cover an average month, not a peak one.

The practical move is to think in steady weekly volume, not your busiest day. If your normal month fits inside the free credits, you may never buy a single paid one.

Flex vs Perpetual, read through the credits

Most people pick Flex or Perpetual on price and ownership, which is fair. But the credit allowance is a real recurring difference worth naming: Flex includes 30 free credits a month; Perpetual includes 10, and only with an active upgrade contract behind it.

For a lab leaning on AI crown design daily, that 30-versus-10 gap is roughly 20 extra free designs a month. At about €1 a credit, call it around €20 a month, or near €240 a year, baked into Flex (assuming you'd otherwise buy those credits, which is the whole point of the comparison). For a Perpetual owner with no upgrade contract, the free number is zero, so every AI run is a purchase.

Here's the honest version: nobody should choose Flex for the credits. The license decision is bigger than that. But if you're already torn and you run AI design heavily, the allowance is a small, legitimate thumb on the scale toward Flex. And if you barely touch AI, it's a non-issue either way.

What the credits actually buy

exocad files these under "AI services." Three of them spend credits, and they earn their keep in very different situations.

AI Design is the workhorse. It generates a first-pass crown proposal that snaps to the preparation margin you've already marked, usually in under two minutes while you keep working. In DentalCAD 3.3 Chemnitz it handles up to three adjacent posterior crowns or a posterior bridge of up to three units, as long as there's at least one neighboring tooth and an antagonist to read. It's strongest on routine posterior morphology where the starting anatomy is predictable. On a single anterior with a specific aesthetic the dentist has already sketched for you, you'll often spend more time fighting the proposal than you'd save.

TruSmile Photo renders your design photorealistically onto a patient's photo inside the Smile Creator module. At two credits, it's a case-acceptance tool, not a per-case habit. Pull it out for the consult where the patient is on the fence about a cosmetic case.

TruSmile Video does the same thing in motion. It's the most expensive at ten credits, and it's worth it on exactly one kind of case: the high-ticket anterior or full-arch where the patient needs to see the smile move before they'll say yes. Impressive, expensive, occasional. Treat it that way.

When a credit pays off, and when manual design is fine

Plainly, because this is where the money is:

• A credit pays off on routine posterior crowns at volume. A decent first pass saves real sculpting minutes, the technician's review is quick, and stacked across 15 or 20 units a day those minutes add up to something you can feel.
• Manual design is fine, and sometimes faster, on low daily volume, on high-aesthetic anterior work, and on any case where you already know exactly the morphology you want. A technician who's quick at manual sculpting on a familiar tooth can beat the round-trip of generating a proposal just to override it.
• The quiet waste is running AI design reflexively on every unit, including the ones you redo by hand anyway, then buying paid credits to feed a habit that isn't actually saving time.

The rule that keeps the bill sane: spend a credit where it removes work, not where it just adds a step you'll undo.

Keeping the bill honest

A few practical notes once you're set up:

• Know your monthly free number, 30 on Flex or 10 on Perpetual-with-contract, and roughly how many AI runs you do. If your runs sit under that most months, paid credits are optional.
• There's nothing to hoard, so use them. Unused License Credits reset to zero at month's end.
• Purchased credits, called Account Credits, are tied to your my.exocad account and shared across every seat on it. So three workstations draw from one pool, which is handy for a multi-seat lab.
• exocad's public pages say the free monthly credits reset but are silent on whether purchased Account Credits expire, so we won't promise either way. Confirm it in writing before buying a large batch you plan to use slowly.

One setup note: AI services run on DentalCAD 3.3 Chemnitz or 3.2 Elefsina (build 9036 or later), with my.exocad integration active and an internet connection during processing, since the computation happens on exocad's servers. For now they're available in the European Union and United States only.

The Dentcore takeaway

If you run AI design daily, treat the free monthly credits as your budget and design around them; on heavy-AI workflows, Flex's larger allowance quietly earns its keep. If you only reach for AI a few times a week, you'll probably never pay for a credit. Either way, the discipline is the same: spend a credit only where it takes work off your bench. exocad's cloud services keep expanding, so treat today's allowances and requirements as current rather than permanent, and confirm the details for your license before you commit.

Read our exocad AI Credits explainer: pricing, features, and where to buy →