500 Free Credits: What You Can Actually Do With Them
May 18, 2026 · 5 min read
Every new Songbrain account starts with 500 credits. No card, no trial timer, no "upgrade to continue." The credits sit in your account from the moment you sign up.
This guide is the practical menu — what each action actually costs, what your 500 buys you, three recipes for spending them well, and four ways to waste them.
The full menu
The whole pipeline: Virality Score, Best Moments timestamps, full Song DNA (tempo, key, energy, mood, loudness), genre + subgenre routing, lyrics transcription, lyric impact scoring, instrument detection, live trend matching.
Budget: 25 analyses with your 500 cr
Paste any TikTok or Instagram Reel link. We analyze the visuals, engagement (snapshotted every 8h × 14 days), comments, and cross-reference with your song. Output: concrete fixes — clip timing, caption misses, hashtag gaps, visual energy mismatch.
Budget: ~16 reels — but OG is capped at 3/month
Same analysis as above, but for any Reel posted within the last 7 days. Credits get auto-refunded once Apify confirms the post date. Designed for tracking your own new releases without burning credits.
Budget: Counts toward the 3/month cap, but doesn't cost credits
Three recipes for spending 500 credits well
500 credits can disappear fast if you scatter them. They can also last months if you have a plan. Here are three ways artists actually use the first 500.
- Day 0 — Upload the final master: 1 analysis (20 cr)
- Day 1 — Drop the track on TikTok: paste your own Reel for fresh reverse (0 cr)
- Day 3 — Drop on Reels: paste it for fresh reverse (0 cr)
- Day 7 — Re-upload the same track to check if the score moved with trend updates: 1 analysis (20 cr)
- Pick your 10 strongest tracks from the last 2 years
- Run all 10 through analysis: 200 cr
- Identify the 3 with highest Virality Score
- Compare their Song DNA to your weaker tracks — look for the production differences
- Re-master one weak track based on findings, re-upload: 20 cr
- Find 3 viral tracks in your subgenre on TikTok
- Paste each into Reel Reverse-Engineering — these are <7 days fresh: 0 cr × 3 (3 of your monthly cap)
- Study where they peak, what visuals they use, what hashtags
- Run your own track against the analysis: 20 cr
- Re-post your track with the corrected timing/caption/hashtag set
Four ways to waste credits
Every Songbrain action costs something. These are the four patterns we see new users fall into that don't produce useful output — skip them and your 500 lasts longer.
Don't upload 5 different mixes of the same song just to see which scores highest. The differences will be in the rounding error. Pick one mix, work the song.
Don't paste random viral reels you found on TikTok "just to see how they score." The reverse-engineering pipeline is built for your own posts — random reels are research, not actionable.
Don't analyze rough demos. The pipeline is calibrated against final-master-quality audio. A demo with placeholder drums will score artificially low because the production-quality model has nothing to grade.
Don't burn the 3/month Reel Reverse cap on someone else's post. Use it on your own releases — that's where the cross-reference with your song analysis pays off.
When the 500 run out
If you're on OG Early Access (the default during our launch window), your account refills +100 credits every month automatically — forever. So even after the initial 500 are spent, you have a continuous run-rate of about 5 song analyses or 3 reel reverses per month.
If you need more, two options: buy a 500-credit top-up pack for $10 (one-time, no subscription), or upgrade to Premium ($19/mo or $180/yr) which adds 1000 credits per month plus Album Upload, Viral Kit PDF Export and Priority Queue.
Free-tier accounts (only assigned after the OG window closes) get 500 credits at signup but no monthly refill — they need to top up or upgrade once the initial 500 are spent.
Your 500 credits are waiting.
Sign up during the launch window for OG Early Access — 500 cr + 100/mo refill forever.
Claim OG Access →