Understanding Your Poko Motion Usage Dashboard: What Actually Drains Credits Fastest

Your balance drops. You're not sure why. Most AI tools leave you guessing at that point, but Poko Motion actually shows you the breakdown - you just have to know where to look.

There are two places to check: a wallet widget that shows your overall balance, and a per-project panel that shows exactly what a video's generation actually cost. Here's how to read both, and what really moves the number.

The Balance widget: your overall health check

In the Studio sidebar, above your account menu, sits a small card labeled Balance. It shows your remaining dollar amount, and it changes color depending on how much is left:

• Green - healthy balance
• Amber - running low, with a "Top up" prompt
• Rose - out, with an "Add funds" prompt

It also shows your current plan name, with an upgrade link if you're not already on the top tier. Click the card at any time and it takes you straight to billing.

This widget answers one question: how much do I have left, right now. For anything more specific, you need the second panel.

The per-project usage panel: where the detail lives

Open a project and you'll find a usage breakdown that tracks that specific project's generation cost:

• Total cost - the dollar amount this project has actually spent
• Turns - how many times you've sent the agent a message
• In / Out tokens - input tokens (what you and your files sent to the model) and output tokens (what the model generated back)
• Cache hit / Cache write - only shown when relevant, these track when the model reused previously-processed context versus processing it fresh
• Last model - which model handled the most recent turn

It updates live while the agent works, with a small pulse animation each time new usage lands. There's also a refresh button to pull your latest billing balance, and a reset link that clears the locally displayed totals for that project.

What actually drains credits fastest

A few patterns show up consistently once you start watching this panel:

• Premium-tier models on routine work. Poko's model tiers - Premium, Fast, Instant - aren't priced the same. Using a Premium model for a small "make the text bigger" edit costs more than it needs to.

• Lots of small turns instead of one batched message. Every message you send is a new turn, and every turn carries its own token cost. Five separate one-line edits usually cost more than the same five changes described in a single message.

• Output tokens, not just input. What the model generates back - explanations, code, scene changes - typically costs more per token than what you send in. Requests that produce a lot of generated output cost more than their input size suggests.

• Repeatedly attaching large context. Pulling in a big folder, a long PDF, or an entire repo as context via @ mention adds real input tokens every time it happens, not just the first time.

• Cache writes versus cache hits. The first time the model processes a large piece of context, that's a cache write, which costs more. Reusing that same context in a later turn is a cheaper cache hit - but jumping between very different contexts forces fresh writes over and over instead of reusing what's cached.

• Extended thinking left on for simple asks. Some models support a thinking toggle for deeper reasoning. It's worth it for a genuinely hard edit, and wasted spend on something simple like a color swap.

What "reset" doesn't do

The reset button on the usage panel is easy to misread as a refund. It isn't one - it only clears the numbers displayed locally for that project so you can track a fresh session from zero. Your real balance and billing history live in the Balance widget and your account's billing page, untouched by anything you reset here.

One thing that costs credits no matter what

If you've switched to bring-your-own-key billing for your agent engine, your provider bills you directly for that - but sound effects and background music generation still draw from Poko credits regardless. BYOK support for audio generation isn't available yet, so that line item shows up on every project even when everything else is on your own key.

Spending less without changing what you build

None of this means scaling back your videos. It means matching effort to the task:

1. Default to a Fast or Instant model for small chat edits; save Premium for the first build or a genuinely complex scene
2. Batch related changes into one message instead of five separate ones
3. Avoid re-attaching the same large folder every turn if the agent already has that context
4. Turn off extended thinking for straightforward requests

Watch the usage panel for a session or two and the pattern becomes obvious fast - it's rarely the video itself that's expensive, it's how the conversation that built it was shaped.