{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "description": "Townie is now pay-per-use",
  "path": "/townie-credits",
  "publishedAt": "2025-06-11T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:a2rdzfdxkjwerrfrpbwcipb2/site.standard.publication/3jd443afc2222",
  "textContent": "Today, we are introducing a new credits payment system for\nTownie, our AI coding assistant. Townie is now\npay-per-use. Here's the upside:\n\n1. You can use Townie as much as you want – no limits\n2. Townie is now priced independently from\n   Val Town Pro, which makes it cheaper for casual\n   Townie users\n3. Townie becomes sustainable\n4. We at Val Town get a clearer signal about how much to invest in making Townie\n   better\n\nHow credits work\n\nWe charge a 50% markup on top of raw LLM costs. If you use $10 in Townie\ncredits, Anthropic will get $6.66 and we'll get $3.33. We think this is fair,\nsustainable, and transparent. We don't want to be in the business of having\nmurky limits, obfuscated credits, or unsustainable margins.\n\nWhen you pay for Townie, you're telling us in the clearest way possible to\ncontinue to invest in Townie. If you don't think Townie is worth the cost, there\nare\nmany wonderful AI coding alternatives that you can use with the new\nVal Town CLI.\nWe want you to choose Townie on its merits, not because it's subsidized.\n\nStart coding with Townie\n\nWe think Townie is one of the best coding assistants out there. It uses agentic\ntool-calling, powered by Claude 4 Sonnet, to read and write your code. It can\neven make test HTTP calls and inspect logs & traces to see how things are\nworking, and keep iterating from there. Paired with Val Town's instant (100ms)\nfull-stack deploys, Townie is one of the fastest ways to create a deployed app.\n\n<p style=\"position: relative; aspect-ratio: 16/9; border: 1.5px solid grey; border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden;\">\n  <iframe src=\"https://player.mux.com/rrh9XQUlruevRn66y8t2CMEkqvIUtRT3BLfMW2ydP3E?thumbnail-time=0&preload=metadata\"\n    style=\"position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border: 0;\"\n    allow=\"accelerometer; gyroscope; autoplay; encrypted-media; picture-in-picture\"\n    allowfullscreen=\"true\"\n  ></iframe>\n</p>\n\nWe hope you give it a shot, and are very eager to hear what you think.\n\nStart coding with Townie here: val.town/townie\n\nps - Townie is\n100% open-source & is hosted on Val Town",
  "title": "Introducing Townie Credits"
}