Original guide

Cloud hosting deals print a one-time AI credit gift. The provider's own rules make it a monthly plan on a separate clock

Answer first: Short answer: the cloud plan cards print a small number of AI credits as a one-time gift and say nothing else about them. The pricing page prints Build with: 5 AI credits for website and app creation (one-time gift) on one cloud plan and 15 on the others, its comparison table carries an AI Builder credits row reading 5, 15 and 15, and the cloud hosting page prints the same line as FREE 15 vibe coding credits (one-time gift) - so the two deal pages this site tracks name the same product three different ways and neither prints a monthly allowance. The provider's own knowledge base describes something other than a one-time gift: agentic mode runs on an AI credit plan that provides a set number of AI credits with your plan, the balance shown in the dashboard is a monthly one, and it resets monthly at the start of your next AI credit plan billing cycle, which the provider states does not follow your hosting plan renewal date. Credits are deducted per request by a dynamic calculation that varies between requests of similar complexity, general inquiries and manual edits both spend credits, top-up credits expire three months after purchase if unused, and the free trial gives five credits for seven days with publishing blocked. The builder also excludes eight hosting features - File Manager, FTP Accounts, Databases, PHP configuration, Cron Jobs, SSH Access, GIT and IP manager - so a site built with the badge cannot use the tools the same plan sells. On both deal pages the words top-up, message, dynamic, free trial and export each appear zero times, and neither page prints what a single credit buys. Derived from the printed figures: 15 credits spread across the printed 48-month term is 0.31 credits per month.

Published: 2026-10-13 00:10

What this guide adds

Every provider fact in this article comes from pages the provider publishes and this site read: the two deal pages this site tracks and the eight knowledge-base articles listed below. The occurrence counts and the exact card strings are this site's own reading of those two deal pages, flattened and lowercased before counting. The credit arithmetic is this site's own calculation on numbers the provider prints, and it is derived rather than sourced: 15 credits across a printed 48-month term is 0.31 credits per month; the same 15 credits granted monthly across 48 months would be 720, which is 48 times the figure printed on the card; a top-up's three-month expiry is about 6 per cent of a 48-month term; and the trial's five credits are one third of the 15 printed on the cloud plan card. The provider does not reconcile the card's one-time gift with the knowledge base's monthly reset, and this article reports that disagreement as observed rather than resolving it. Where the provider publishes nothing - the credit cost of a request, the size of a monthly allowance, how many projects a tier allows, or whether unused subscription credits roll over - the article says so rather than estimating.

What the two deal pages actually print about AI credits

The pricing page mentions AI credits six times and AI Builder credits twice, and it uses the phrase one-time gift seven times. The cloud hosting page prints AI credits zero times. What it prints instead is vibe coding credits, once, on its single cloud plan card. The same phrase appears once on the pricing page too, on an agency plan card, so across the two pages this site tracks the identical bundle of credits is described as AI credits, as AI Builder credits and as vibe coding credits.

The exact strings matter more than the counts. The pricing page plan cards read Build with: 5 AI credits for website and app creation (one-time gift) and Build with: 15 AI credits for website and app creation (one-time gift). The pricing page comparison table carries a row labelled AI Builder credits whose three plan columns read 5, 15 and 15, and two further rows labelled AI Builder: Agentic mode and AI Builder: Manual mode. The cloud hosting page plan card reads FREE 15 vibe coding credits (one-time gift).

Both deal pages also print AI tools as a plan feature, ten times on the pricing page and twice on the cloud page, and both carry AI Builder in the global navigation and footer rather than in the plan cards. That distinction matters for the cloud page: all five of its agentic hits and both of its AI Builder hits are navigation and footer text, so the cloud deal page's own plan card describes the credits as vibe coding credits and never uses the words AI Builder or AI credits inside the offer itself.

The card says one-time gift; the documentation says monthly

The knowledge base article on AI credits opens by stating that agentic mode needs an active hosting plan to create and publish projects in addition to an AI credit plan that provides a set number of AI credits with your plan. It then describes the balance the dashboard shows: a monthly credit balance with a next reset date, where credits reset monthly at the start of your next AI credit plan billing cycle.

That sentence carries two facts the deal pages do not print. The first is that the allowance is monthly rather than one-off. The second is the clock it follows: the provider states that the reset does not follow your hosting plan renewal date. A buyer comparing a cloud hosting deal is therefore looking at two billing cycles running on different schedules inside the same purchase, and only one of them is printed on the page that sells the deal.

The arithmetic shows how far apart the two descriptions sit. Derived from the printed figures: 15 credits spread evenly across the printed 48-month term is 0.31 credits per month. If the same 15 credits were instead granted every month for the 48 months, the term would carry 720 credits, which is 48 times the number printed on the card. The provider prints both the one-time gift wording and the monthly reset wording on its own pages and does not reconcile them, so this article reports the gap rather than picking a side. Which of the two describes what a given buyer actually receives is not stated anywhere this site could read.

What a credit buys is a calculation, not a published rate

Neither deal page prints a rate. The words message and dynamic each appear zero times on both the pricing page and the cloud hosting page, and prompt appears zero times on the pricing page and once on the cloud page, inside a description of the connector product rather than in the plan card. So no page states how many requests a credit covers or how many credits a request costs. The knowledge base does describe the mechanism, and the mechanism is deliberately unpriced.

Credits are deducted for each request based on the current credit-usage calculation rather than a fixed per-message fee, and the provider states that the number of credits deducted varies between requests even for requests of similar complexity. The dynamic credits article adds that the deduction is calculated to two decimal places, that simple short questions generally consume fewer credits, and that advanced requests requiring heavy computation, deep analysis or extensive code generation generally consume more.

Two further details change how a buyer should budget. First, the provider states that all messages are included in the calculation, including general inquiries and non-coding interactions, so a question that produces no code still spends credits. Second, manual edits made in Select and edit mode, such as changing text or replacing an image, also deduct a small number of credits, because the provider processes them the same way as AI-generated changes. The one piece of advice the documentation gives is to split large projects into smaller focused prompts, which raises accuracy and also spends a message per step.

Top-ups are the more expensive route, and they expire

The knowledge base offers a second way to buy credits and states plainly that it costs more per unit: top-ups are more expensive per credit than subscriptions, but they do not require an additional subscription. Neither deal page mentions the option - top-up and top up both appear zero times on the pricing page and zero times on the cloud hosting page - so the only route printed on the pages that sell the deal is the one-time gift on the card.

Top-ups carry an expiry the subscription credits are not documented as carrying. The provider states that top-ups expire three months after purchase if unused, and that the options range from 10 credits to thousands. Derived from the printed figures: three months is about 90 days against the 1,461 days in the printed 48-month term, so a top-up bundle has to be consumed inside roughly 6 per cent of the term it was bought alongside.

The upgrade rules for top-ups are stated twice, in the credits article and again in the upgrade article, and both say the same thing: purchased top-up credits are not affected by a plan upgrade, they remain in the balance in addition to the credits from the new plan, and they are not applied as a discount toward the upgrade payment. The dashboard breaks the two pools apart, listing the monthly credit balance and then each additional bundle with its own individual expiry date, so a buyer can see which credits are about to lapse.

The trial gives five credits, seven days, and no publishing

The free trial is documented in detail and appears nowhere on either deal page: free trial appears zero times on the pricing page and zero times on the cloud hosting page. The knowledge base states that the trial lasts 7 days and includes 5 complimentary credits if agentic mode is chosen. Derived from the printed figures: five credits is one third of the 15 printed on the cloud hosting page's plan card.

Two restrictions are printed in the notes rather than in the headline. During the trial period websites cannot be published, and online stores created during the trial cannot connect payment methods. A trial user can therefore build and preview, but cannot put anything live. The trial project is kept as a draft in the account, and the provider lists four ways to move past that state: publish it, get more credits, export the project code, or upgrade to a paid plan.

The provider also answers the obvious follow-up in its own FAQ: if the trial is not upgraded, the project remains saved as a draft. The trial prompt flow is documented with its own advice too - a description of 2 to 5 sentences, and a suggested choice between Manual for drag-and-drop editing and Agentic for building through a conversation, with the note that agentic mode uses AI credits. The provider states that a first prompt that clearly describes something suited to agentic mode may route the user there directly during setup, so the mode is not always the buyer's own choice.

The plan tiers that carry agentic mode are named nowhere on the deal pages

The two modes are priced differently and the deal pages do not say so. Manual mode is documented as included with most Hostinger Web and Cloud hosting plans, which is why the plan cards can badge the builder at all. Agentic mode is documented as requiring a separate credit-based subscription, and the knowledge base names the tier family: Explorer, Starter, Hobbyist or Hustler plans, plus an active hosting plan to publish.

None of those four names appears on either deal page as an AI credit tier. Explorer, Hobbyist and Hustler each appear zero times on the pricing page and zero times on the cloud hosting page; Starter appears once on each page only inside the phrase starter templates in a developer-tools navigation block. The pricing page does list AI Builder: Agentic mode and AI Builder: Manual mode as rows in its comparison table, so the table distinguishes the two modes by name, but the cells in those rows carry no credit allowance and no price that this site could read as text. The numeric allowance appears only on the separate AI Builder credits row, which reads 5, 15 and 15 without saying which mode it applies to.

The upgrade article confirms that credits and plan benefits are two different levers. It tells a user to upgrade to a higher-tier plan for other plan benefits, such as creating more projects or additional email inboxes, rather than for immediate credits, and it says that a user who has reached the plan messages limit has the option to purchase additional credits without upgrading the plan. That single phrase, plan messages limit, is the only reference this site found to a message cap - and no page read for this article prints a number for it.

Eight hosting features a site built with the builder cannot use

The sharpest finding is a limitation list the deal pages never mention. The knowledge base states that Hostinger AI Builder does not include access to some hosting plan features, and prints the list: File Manager, with a media library instead; FTP Accounts; Databases; PHP configuration; Cron Jobs; SSH Access; GIT; and IP manager. The provider's own advice attached to that list is to use another content management system such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or PrestaShop if those tools are needed.

That list collides with what the same plans advertise. The pricing page's feature block headed Every plan has everything you need and more prints SSH and WP-CLI for faster site management, SFTP account management for secure team access, PHP version management offers better performance and Cron jobs automate tasks. Its comparison table prints databases and Database size as plan rows. The cloud hosting page's plan card prints a Dedicated IP address. So a buyer can read the plan page and the builder documentation and find the same capability sold on one and excluded on the other. The strings are not identical - the plan page says SFTP account management while the builder list says FTP Accounts - and this article reports both as printed rather than treating them as the same thing.

Two more restrictions sit alongside the list. The provider states that custom code cannot be imported from third-party platforms such as GitHub, and GitHub appears zero times on both deal pages. And mobile app development for iOS or Android is not offered; the builder can be used on a phone to edit and preview a web app, but not to produce a native mobile app. On the positive side the same article lists what is supported: Stripe, AdSense and SEO integrations, 80 or more languages, image and voice prompts, and a built-in Integrated AI that removes the need for external API keys, using cost-efficient models for text and named image generation models for images.

The mode switch runs one way

The two modes are not interchangeable, and the rule is printed only in the knowledge base. The provider states that a manual mode website can be switched to agentic mode directly and that the existing site is recreated 1:1 in agentic mode, and that switching from agentic mode to manual mode is not supported. The deal pages print manual mode twice on the pricing page and zero times on the cloud hosting page, and neither page states that the choice of mode is effectively permanent in one direction.

The switch has a documented side effect on contact forms. Existing Hostinger Reach forms convert to native forms automatically when a site is switched to agentic mode, and the site stays connected to the same Reach profile. The provider links its forms documentation for the details.

The maintenance expectations differ too, and the provider states them plainly. A user choosing agentic mode is described as someone prepared to occasionally review code or hire a developer if a complex function breaks, and the mode notes warn that custom code editing may require manual intervention or developer knowledge if the generated logic needs advanced debugging. Manual mode is described as a platform where the technical foundation is fully handled by the provider, and the comparison table frames the trade-off as giving up server access functionality such as file manager, FTP, SSH and databases in exchange for speed and ease of use.

The ecommerce route is a second subscription

Both modes can build a store, and both route the selling through a product the hosting deal does not include. In manual mode the provider states that the builder connects to a separate Hostinger Ecommerce subscription by default, supporting up to 1,000 products, and that this subscription is billed separately from the AI Builder manual mode plan. In agentic mode the store is connected automatically when the user requests an online store in the chat, with support stated as up to 1,000 to 1,400 products, and that subscription is billed separately as well.

Neither deal page says any of this. The phrase ecommerce subscription appears zero times on the pricing page and zero times on the cloud hosting page, and the product figure 1,000 products appears zero times on both. The pricing page does print Ecommerce available as a plan feature and Ecommerce Website Builder in its footer tools list, which describes availability without describing the second bill.

The gift card feature documents its own boundaries, which are the kind of terms a store owner needs before selling one. A gift card product can carry up to 50 different amounts, with at least one mandatory, and the seller can choose an expiry from preset timeframes of 1, 3, 6, 12 or 24 months, changeable later but not retroactively for cards already sold. A single gift card can be used only once, and if the cart total is lower than the card amount the remainder cannot be used on another purchase. Gift cards do not cover shipping costs, and more than one card can be applied to a single order.

What the AI badges leave unstated

Several things a buyer would need are published nowhere this site could read. There is no published credit cost per request: the provider explains that the deduction is dynamic, calculated to two decimal places and variable between similar requests, but prints no rate, so the 5 credits on one cloud plan card and the 15 on the others cannot be converted into a number of requests or a number of months.

The relationship between the card's one-time gift and the documented monthly allowance is not reconciled on any page read. The plan card says one-time gift; the credits article says the balance is monthly and resets at the start of the next AI credit plan billing cycle. Whether the gift is the first month of that allowance, an additional pool on top of it, or the whole of it, is not stated. The same unresolved question applies to expiry: the provider prints a three-month expiry for top-up credits and prints no expiry for subscription credits, so whether unused monthly credits carry over is unstated.

Also unstated: any number for the plan messages limit the upgrade article refers to; how many projects or websites each credit tier allows, since the upgrade article mentions more projects and additional email inboxes without printing quantities; whether the 5-credit gift on the cheaper cloud plan and the 15 on the others are the same credit type, given that the two deal pages name them differently; and what the price of a top-up bundle actually is, since the provider prints a range from 10 credits to thousands and states only that top-ups cost more per credit than subscriptions. Each of those cells is left as unstated here rather than estimated.