Octane AI Pricing for Skincare Quizzes: Credits, Plans, Payback

A skincare quiz on Octane AI costs $50 a month on Basic (400 credits, up to two quizzes) or $200 on Plus (2,200 credits, unlimited quizzes), and each quiz start uses one credit. It pays back when it adds more orders than the plan price divided by your profit per order: five extra orders a month for a $100 tier at $20 an order.

The plan price is rarely the number that surprises people. Credits are spent by shoppers, not by you, so a good influencer post can burn a month's allowance in a weekend. Extra credits are also billed at a different rate on each tier, so the cheapest plan on paper is not always the cheapest plan in a busy month. The sums below start from the credit and end with the orders a quiz must add.

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How credits are spent on a skincare quiz

Octane's pricing page states the rule plainly: one credit equals one quiz start. Its help centre counts a start when a shopper moves past the first screen of a live quiz, whether or not they finish. Building the quiz with Octane's AI assistant is free, and the help centre says testing AI features in dashboard preview does not use credits either, so you can draft and rework questions without touching your allowance.

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The in-quiz AI features cost extra credits each time they run. The pricing page says they start from 0.04 credits per use, and that Smart Products, the feature that picks products for a shopper's answers, uses about 0.3 credits per quiz. For a skincare shop that wants the quiz to recommend a cleanser, serum and moisturiser from a catalogue of 40 products, that is the feature you will almost certainly switch on. So the working figure is about 1.3 credits per quiz start, and I will use that from here on.

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Two other details shape the bill. The help centre says your credit balance resets on the first day of each billing cycle; the pricing page's plan-switching answer adds that unused credits roll over for 30 days, without more detail, so check how leftovers show under Billing before you count on them. And the Unlimited plans, which start well above anything a small skincare brand needs, count only AI credits and not quiz starts.

One AI feature deserves a skincare-specific note. Image Analysis lets a shopper upload or take a photo during the quiz, and the help centre prices it at 0.3 credits per analysis run. A "snap your skin" step is tempting, but a face photo is personal data, so read Octane's privacy terms and your own privacy notice before adding it, and expect each photo step to add the same 0.3 credits as Smart Products.

The plan ladder at the prices Octane lists

Octane's help centre lists each plan as a tier of monthly credits. The first four rows are the ones a small skincare brand is likely to look at. Annual billing is shown as the yearly total.

The pricing page shows yearly billing as $43 a month for Basic and $170 for Plus, a 15 per cent saving, and adds that Basic includes up to two quizzes and Plus has no quiz limit. Two quizzes is more than it sounds for a skincare brand: a "find your routine" quiz and a "which cleanser for my skin type" quiz fill both slots. A third quiz, say a gift-set finder before the holidays, is the usual reason to move up.

The pricing page's FAQ says extra credits are billed at the end of the billing cycle at a rate that depends on your plan, and that you can see your exact rate in your account. The help-centre table gives the per-tier rates above, and I use them in the sums. Older pages and third-party round-ups quote a single flat overage rate, so if you have read one, trust the rate in your own dashboard over it.

Which tier a given month of traffic needs

Take the credits needed as quiz starts multiplied by 1.3, with overage protection switched on so the quiz never stops. The table prices each volume against each tier, adding overage at that tier's rate. All figures are illustrative arithmetic on the list prices above.

Look at the 600-start row. The $50 plan with overage lands within $2.50 of the $100 plan. That makes the first tier a sensible place to start when you do not yet know your volume, provided you set a cap on extra credits so a spike cannot surprise you. Once you are regularly above about 770 starts, the 900-credit tier is the cheaper home.

A worked payback sum for one skincare shop

Picture a small shop selling eight cleansers, serums and moisturisers, with 12,000 store sessions a month. It places a "Find your routine" quiz in the home-page banner and on the three collection pages. Say 5 per cent of sessions start it. That is 600 quiz starts and, with Smart Products on, about 780 credits.

The cost side first. At 780 credits the Basic 400 tier costs $50 plus 380 extra credits at $0.125, which is $47.50, so $97.50. The Basic 900 tier is $100 flat. Take the $100 tier for the certainty and a billing line that never moves.

Now the revenue side. Suppose the average order is $48 and, after product cost, shipping, packaging and payment fees, each order leaves $20 of contribution. Quiz starters usually convert better than ordinary visitors, but not all of that lift is the quiz: some would have bought anyway. So compare against what the same people would have done without it. If those 600 people would have converted at 3 per cent (18 orders) and the quiz lifts them to 6 per cent (36 orders), the quiz is responsible for 18 extra orders.

Incremental orders       = 36 - 18            = 18
Incremental contribution = 18 x $20           = $360
Quiz cost (Basic 900)                         = $100
Net gain per month                            = $260
Break-even orders        = $100 / $20         = 5 extra orders

The break-even line is the one to keep. At $20 contribution an order, the $100 tier needs five extra orders a month. At $12 contribution it needs about nine. If your contribution per order is $8, as it can be on a heavily discounted starter kit, the same quiz needs twelve or thirteen. Run the sum with your own contribution figure, not the selling price.

The 3 per cent baseline is the soft spot in any quiz payback sum. If you cannot measure it, run the quiz for a month on half of the collection pages and compare. The tutorial on which reporting tool to use first covers getting that comparison out of your store data.

What an influencer spike does to the bill

Here is a mistake that costs real money, shown with numbers. The same shop is on the $100 tier, 900 credits, with Overages Protection on and no cap. An influencer posts a link to the quiz and 3,000 people start it in four days.

Quiz starts                 3,000
Credits used (x 1.3)        3,900
Included                      900
Extra credits               3,000
Extra cost at $0.1111     = $333.30
Month total               = $433.30

If those 3,000 visitors convert at 6 per cent that is 180 orders and the spike pays for itself many times over. If they are curious scrollers who convert at 1 per cent, it is 30 orders at $20, so $600 contribution against $433 of quiz cost. Still positive, but thin. The point is that the cost arrives on the invoice at the end of the cycle, so it should be a decision you made in advance.

Octane's help centre says that with Overages Protection on you can set a monthly overage limit and receive usage alerts as you approach it. With it off, new quiz starts and AI features pause when credits run out and resume when credits reset, you upgrade or you turn protection back on. Both settings sit under Billing, then Credits usage limits, in the dashboard. For a skincare shop heading into a launch week, I would turn it on with a cap equal to the extra spend I would be happy with, say $150, and set the alert at 80 per cent of included credits.

Using the 300 trial credits properly

The pricing page advertises a 14-day free trial with full feature access, and the help centre says new accounts receive 300 trial credits, with email alerts at 80 and 90 per cent used. When the credits run out, the account moves to the plan you chose at sign-up and billing begins. Quizzes keep running, because Overages Protection is switched on by default for accounts moving from trial to paid. Neither page says which ends the trial first if both limits apply, so check your trial status on day one.

That means the trial is not a pause button. Treat 300 credits as roughly 230 quiz starts with Smart Products on, and plan the test before you embed anything:

1. Build the quiz with Octane's free AI builder and test it yourself and with three or four friends or staff, which costs a handful of credits.
2. Pick the plan you expect to need before the credits run out, and set the overage cap to your comfort limit.
3. Embed the quiz on one high-traffic page only, so 230 starts takes a week or so, not a day.
4. Write down the starts, completions, email sign-ups and orders from quiz takers at the end of that week, then decide.

A shop with 2,000 sessions a week and a 5 per cent start rate will use the 300 credits in roughly two and a half weeks. A shop doing 12,000 a month will use them in about a week and a half. Either way, the decision window is short.

Cost per start and cost per order

Two unit costs make plans comparable. Cost per quiz start is the plan price divided by starts: $100 for 600 starts is about $0.17. Cost per quiz-attributed order is the plan price divided by incremental orders: $100 for 18 orders is $5.56. Compare that second figure to what you pay for an order from advertising.

Suppose the same shop pays $14 to win an order through paid social. The quiz at $5.56 an incremental order is cheaper, but only while it runs on traffic you already have. It does not buy new visitors. If the quiz sits on a page nobody sees, its cost per order climbs without limit. So the plan question and the placement question are the same question, and the tutorial on chat, quiz or AI search for a small store helps decide where a quiz belongs.

Reading your own numbers with a prompt

If you export quiz starts, completions and orders into a sheet, you can have an assistant check the sum for you. This prompt works with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Paste in your own figures, and keep names and email addresses out of the data.

I run a small skincare shop. Here are last month's figures:
- Quiz starts: 640
- Quiz completions: 410
- Email sign-ups from the quiz: 290
- Orders from quiz completers: 31
- Orders from a comparable group who did not take the quiz (same pages, same dates): 17 per 640 sessions
- Average order value: $46
- Contribution per order after product cost, shipping and fees: $19
- Octane plan: Basic, 900 credits, $100 a month, overage $0.1111 per credit
- Credits used: 830 (Smart Products on)
Calculate incremental orders, incremental contribution, net gain after the plan price, break-even orders per month and cost per incremental order. Then list the two assumptions in my figures that could most easily be wrong.

A realistic reply, labelled illustrative, runs like this: incremental orders 14 (31 minus 17), incremental contribution $266, net $166 after the $100 plan, break-even about 5.3 orders and cost per incremental order $7.14. A good answer then flags that the comparison group is not randomised, and that orders may be counted on the day of the quiz while skincare orders often come back after a few days.

What I would fix in that answer: the assistant will usually treat all 31 orders as ordinary orders, but a quiz can pull an order forward from a visit the shopper would have made anyway. If you ran any discount code inside the quiz, subtract the discount from the contribution before you trust the net gain. Also check the arithmetic yourself once; assistants are good at structure and occasionally careless with the last decimal.

Four quiz decisions that change the credit bill

Where the quiz is placed

A banner on the home page invites every session. A button on a product page invites only people already considering that product. The second produces fewer starts and more orders per start. For a shop on the 400-credit tier, product-page placement keeps starts under the allowance while still catching buyers.

Whether Smart Products runs on every quiz

At about 0.3 credits per quiz, Smart Products raises each start's credit use by nearly a third. If your quiz result is simply "your skin type is combination, here is the bundle", a fixed mapping of answers to products might do without it. That drops use to one credit per start. If shoppers can answer in many combinations and your range is large, the AI matching earns its credits. Test both for a week.

How many questions you ask

Every start costs a credit whether or not the shopper completes the quiz, so a twelve-question quiz that loses half its starters by question four wastes credits. Five to seven questions with the skin concern first tends to keep people in. Credits do not distinguish between completions and abandons, so abandonment is a direct cost.

What you do with the answers afterwards

The email address and the skin profile are worth more than the single order. A shopper who said "dry, sensitive, fragrance-free" can get a refill reminder timed to the size they bought, which the tutorial on timing skincare refill reminders from orders walks through. If the quiz data is never used after the first session, you are paying for a one-off conversion lift only.

When the cheapest plan is still the wrong one

Three cases push the answer away from the headline price. First, a brand with four distinct audiences, say adult skin, teen skin, men's grooming and a body range, wants four quizzes, which rules out Basic's two-quiz limit regardless of credit use. Second, a shop with a seasonal peak that triples its traffic for six weeks is better on a higher tier for those months, billed monthly, than on a yearly plan sized for the peak. Third, a store with very low traffic, under about 200 quiz starts a month, may find the $50 floor is the whole question, and that a free form on the product page asking for skin type would do most of the job.

Annual billing is the other lever. The $50 plan is $510 a year and the $100 plan is $1,020, so annual billing saves $90 and $180. Do not buy a year until you have run at least two full months at real traffic, because you will otherwise be paying twelve months for a guess.

The claims check before the quiz goes live

A skincare quiz generates sentences about skin. "Your skin barrier is damaged" or "this serum treats acne" turn a recommendation into a claim, and Smart Copy can write them unless your prompt rules them out. Read every result screen. The tutorial on what AI copy for skincare must not say lists the phrases to catch, and your own regulatory adviser has the final word on wording for the markets you sell into. I would also keep a record of the version of the quiz copy that went live on each date, in case you need to show what shoppers saw.

A one-page checklist to run before you pay

• Monthly sessions on the pages where the quiz will sit, and the start rate you honestly expect (2 to 5 per cent is a cautious range to test).
• Credits needed: starts multiplied by 1 or 1.3, depending on Smart Products.
• Contribution per order after all variable costs, not the selling price.
• Baseline conversion for the same visitors without the quiz, even if estimated.
• Break-even orders: plan price divided by contribution per order.
• Overages Protection on or off, and the monthly cap.
• Number of quizzes you need in the first six months, against the Basic limit of two.
• Who reads the result copy for claims, and where the quiz answers go afterwards.

If the break-even is under ten orders a month and your store already sells that many on the pages in question, the quiz is a low-risk test. If the break-even is thirty orders and you sell forty in total, wait and fix your product pages first.

Octane AI credit questions skincare owners ask

Does building a quiz with Octane AI use credits?

No. Octane's pricing page and help centre say building quizzes with the AI assistant is free, and testing AI features in dashboard preview does not use credits. Credits are spent when shoppers use the live quiz: one credit for each quiz start, plus a fraction of a credit each time an in-quiz AI feature such as Smart Products or Smart Copy runs.

What happens if I run out of credits mid-month?

It depends on the Overages Protection setting. With it on, quizzes keep running and extra credits are billed at your plan's overage rate, with an optional monthly cap. With it off, new quiz starts and AI tools pause until credits reset or you upgrade.

What does an extra Octane AI credit cost?

It depends on the tier. Octane's help-centre table lists $0.125 a credit on the 400-credit Basic tier, falling to $0.0909 on the 2,200-credit Plus tier and lower on bigger plans. The pricing page says overage is billed at the end of the cycle at your plan's rate and shows the exact rate in your account, so check there.

Can I test Octane before paying?

Yes. The pricing page advertises a 14-day free trial, and the help centre says new accounts get 300 trial credits. When the trial credits run out, the account moves to the plan you selected and billing starts, so set the plan and the Overages Protection limit before launching the quiz.

Further reads

• Klaviyo vs Shopify Email: Which Suits a Small Store? — Choose where quiz answers and sign-ups should flow.
• AI Marketing Tools for Shopify: Which App for Which Job — Match marketing apps to the job, quiz included.
• AI Product Recommendations on Shopify: Built-In vs Paid Apps — Compare built-in recommendations with paid apps.
• How Much Does It Cost to Add AI to a Shopify Store? — See the wider cost of adding AI to a store.
• AI for Beauty Brands: Product Copy, Photos and Customer Questions — A worked product page for a small beauty brand: AI drafts the copy, photos and replies, and a claims check keeps every line provable.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: Octane AI pricing page and the two help-centre plans and credits articles, read 5 November 2026.