Usage limit best practices

Editing in Repaint draws on a weekly usage allowance, and everything the AI does for you spends some of it. Using that allowance well lets you build more before you reach your limit. This article covers where usage tends to go and how to make it last. For how usage and credits actually work, see how usage and credits work.

What burns usage quickly

Some of the heaviest actions are also the easiest to trigger without realizing it. Knowing where usage goes helps you spot when you're spending it fast:

• Importing or migrating large sites. Rebuilding many pages is heavy work, whether they're blog posts or anything else. There's no real way around it: more pages means more usage.
• Redoing your whole site's style. A site-wide restyle essentially regenerates every page, so it can cost almost as much as building the site over again.
• Generating images. Creating images is one of the most expensive things the AI does. A first draft that fills a page with a gallery can use a large share of your allowance in a single pass.
• Editing images. A casual request like "redo all the images" can regenerate a dozen at once. Changing images repeatedly is one of the fastest ways to burn through usage on work you may not even keep.
• Making lots of edits. Tweaking every small detail across every page adds up through sheer volume, even when each change is minor.
• Adding big files to the chat. The AI reads everything you attach, and large files like images are heavy to read. This is sometimes exactly what you should do, but it's worth knowing it's a high-cost action.

Not all of this is avoidable. A big site with lots of images simply costs more to build, and that's expected. The goal isn't to avoid the heavy actions, it's to know where your usage is going so you spend it on the things you actually want.

How to preserve your usage

The biggest way to preserve usage is to avoid unnecessary work. Most waste comes from making the AI redo things it has already done, and these habits cut down on that:

• Get your style right before building out pages. Settle the look on your homepage first, then scale out. Your other pages come out closer to finished, so you avoid restyling the whole site after the fact.
• Be specific when fixing something. Describe what it looks like now and what you want instead. Precise instructions help the AI fix issues more consistently, so you don't have to spend extra prompts on the same problem.
• Combine changes into one request. A single update that makes several changes at once costs less than the same changes made one at a time.
• Refer back instead of repeating. Point the AI to information from earlier in the chat rather than pasting it in again.
• Edit text directly instead of through chat. Direct edits on the page use a much cheaper model, so they barely touch your usage. Reach for them for small things like typos and rewording.
• Avoid generating images you don't need. Supply your own images when you have them, or ask for placeholder squares to fill in later. Either way, you skip the cost of generating images you might replace.