How MarketMee tokens work - budgeting your content calendar

If you've ever hesitated before clicking Generate because you weren't sure what it would cost, this post is for you. MarketMee runs on a token-based billing system, and the good news is that it's more predictable than it first looks. Once you know which actions spend tokens and which are completely free, you can plan a whole month of content and know—roughly—what you'll use before the month starts.

This guide walks through how tokens actually work in MarketMee, which parts of your content calendar are free, and a simple way to budget so you never run out mid-week.

How the token system works

Every MarketMee plan includes a monthly token allowance. Tokens are the currency for AI work—writing a video, painting an image, recording a voiceover, and so on. The important thing to internalise is this: MarketMee shows the cost of every action before you commit to it. You're never guessing in the dark.

There are two kinds of tokens in your balance, and they behave differently:

• Monthly tokens: included with your plan and reset each billing period. Unused monthly tokens don't roll over—they reset each month.
• Top-up tokens: tokens you buy on top of your plan. These never expire and carry over month to month.

You can see all of this in one place. Go to Billing in the sidebar, where Your plan shows your current plan, monthly tokens, and balance, and Tokens breaks down how much of your balance is monthly versus top-up. Plans start at $19/month and scale up to higher tiers, each with a larger allowance.

What costs tokens (and what doesn't)

The single biggest win for budgeting is knowing where your tokens go. A surprising amount of MarketMee is free.

Free—use these as much as you like

These actions never touch your balance:

• Commit analysis and changelogs—connecting a repo and getting plain-English summaries of your commits
• Post writing, rewrites, and captions—the words are free
• Autopilot runs—you only pay for the content they generate, not for the runs themselves
• Video rendering and MP4 downloads—once a video is written, rendering it to a final file is free
• Direct edits to videos—changing on-screen text, narration, and colours in the Narration beats panel
• Scheduling, publishing, and live post status

That means a lot of the day-to-day work—analysing commits, drafting captions, tweaking wording, scheduling across accounts—costs nothing.

What spends tokens

Tokens are spent on the heavy AI generation:

• Marketing images: a fixed cost per image
• Video interpretation (writing and animating a video): priced by the length you pick, from 15 seconds up to 2 minutes—longer videos cost more
• Voiceover: charged per scene, when you start the render
• Background music: a fixed cost per video
• AI image for a video scene: a fixed cost per scene image
• Image edits and AI edits to a video: a fixed cost per edit
• AI-drafted video brief and music regeneration: a fixed cost each

Notice the pattern: generating new content costs tokens; editing by hand and publishing generally don't.

Budgeting a month of content

Here's a practical way to turn that into a plan. Think in terms of your weekly rhythm, then multiply.

Step 1: Decide your weekly output

Sketch what a normal week looks like. For example:

• Two marketing images for smaller updates
• One short narrated video for a bigger feature
• Captions and scheduling for everything (free)

Step 2: Watch the cost preview before you generate

Every generation dialog shows its token cost up front. When you create images, the Number of images step shows the tokens before you click Generate X images. When you set up a video, longer durations are clearly more expensive to write, so picking 30s instead of 2 min is a real lever. In Review and Approve, the token cost is shown before you generate any variants or images.

Step 3: Leave room for edits

Edits are where budgets quietly drift. Direct edits to a video—text, narration, colours—are free, so reach for those first. Reserve the token-charged AI edits (via the Chat panel) and Apply Edit on images for changes you can't make by hand. A good habit: get the generation right with a clear prompt, then fine-tune with free direct edits.

Step 4: Account for Autopilot

If you've turned on Autopilot, remember it generates content on your chosen cadence—Every hour, Every 6 hours, Every 12 hours, Daily, or Weekly. The runs are free, but the images and videos they produce are not. If you're budgeting tightly, a Daily or Weekly cadence is more predictable than Every hour, and you can always use Run now when you actually ship something worth announcing.

Never get caught short

Two features keep your calendar running smoothly:

• Top-ups: under Billing → Tokens, click Buy on a token pack. Checkout opens in a new tab, and tokens land in your balance immediately. Because top-up tokens never expire, buying a pack during a busy launch week is safe—leftovers carry forward.
• Auto top-up: set a balance threshold and a token pack, and MarketMee automatically buys that pack whenever your balance drops below the threshold. Turn it on before a launch and you won't stall halfway through generating a batch.

One more safety net worth knowing: failed generations refund their tokens automatically. If something doesn't complete, you're not charged for it.

Keep an eye on the trend

To see where your tokens actually went, open the Activity tab under Billing. It's a paginated history showing when each operation ran, what it was, how many tokens it spent, and your balance afterward. After a week or two, patterns jump out—maybe videos are your biggest line item, or maybe image edits add up faster than you expected. That's the data you use to right-size next month's plan.

If you're on the Free tier, you can't generate new content beyond your onboarding sample, but you can still post that sample and use every other feature—so it's a genuine way to see the whole workflow before committing tokens.

Budgeting your content calendar in MarketMee really comes down to three habits: lean on the free actions, read the cost preview before every generation, and let auto top-up cover the surprises. Do that, and a month of consistent posts stops feeling like a gamble. Start planning yours at marketmee.app.