A 402 Payment Required response from a generation endpoint means your team's monthly credit allowance is fully used up. No content is generated when this error occurs, and no credits are deducted for the failed request. Everything else in Shipstar continues to work normally — published content stays live, and you can still review, edit, approve, and publish existing drafts.
What the error looks like
The response body will contain a human-readable message showing how many credits were used and what the limit is:
{ "detail": "Monthly credit limit reached (1000/1000 used). Upgrade your plan to keep generating content."}Your options
- Wait for the next billing reset. Credits reset monthly on your billing anchor day — the day of the month you first signed up, capped at the 28th. Unused credits do not roll over. Scheduled content generation automatically resumes after the reset; you do not need to take any action.
- Upgrade your plan. Moving from the Free plan (1,000 credits/month) to Solo (50,000 credits/month) or Team (50,000 credits per seat, pooled) gives you significantly more headroom. You can upgrade from Account → Plan in the dashboard.
- Check your current usage. The dashboard sidebar shows a live credit meter. For a detailed breakdown — credits used, credits remaining, and the exact reset date — go to Account → Plan.
Credit costs by content type
Each generation charges a fixed number of credits when the job is queued. Long-form content costs more than short-form:
| Content type | Credits | | --- | --- | | Blog Post, Feature Page, KB Articles, Changelog, Release Notes Email | 100 each | | Weekly Product Update, Content Ideas | 50 each | | Daily Product Update, LinkedIn Post, Twitter Thread | 25 each |
On the Free plan's 1,000 monthly credits, that is roughly 10 long-form pieces or 40 social posts per month.