Apple has started selling extra AI use. In Logic Pro 13, its music app for Mac, the new assistant that can start a song or set up a vocal track from one prompt stops at a monthly limit. A Buy More Usage button then offers a $49.99 pack, the first of its kind from Apple.
The pack works like prepaid phone credit
You pay once, and the extra use is drawn only after you reach the monthly limit that comes with your subscription. What you do not use carries over from month to month, then expires 12 months after you bought it. It works only for the Apple Account that bought it, so a family cannot share one, and it is sold in eight countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom.
Apple gives no number of requests, because the limit depends on how complex your conversations with the assistant are. The assistant also needs the $12.99 a month Creator Studio subscription. The $199.99 version of Logic Pro that you buy once does not include it. So a long-time Logic owner who wants the assistant pays $129 a year, and one pack costs about four months of that subscription.
A count on a support page is not a budget
For Creator Studio's other AI features, Apple's published minimum is 50 presentations a month. In February, a developer made one Keynote presentation and watched it use 47% of his month. Apple's figure assumed 8 to 10 slides each, and a real deck with images costs more than that average.
That was one person's deck, and Apple's allowances may have changed since. But take a manager who builds a weekly sales deck. If each one costs anything like his did, her month is gone in the second week, and she hits the wall in the middle of a job. That is the moment a $49.99 pack is easiest to say yes to, and it is the same moment iCloud makes its sale: when the backup stops.
The same meter is coming to Siri and Photos
Apple has said that expanded use of Siri AI, Image Playground and the photo tools in Photos will be available for a fee, and that most iCloud+ plans will include it. The home-camera AI features in iOS 27 already require the 2TB plan or larger, which costs $9.99 a month.
So for many families, the iCloud+ bill will become the AI bill. Some will move to a bigger plan because they ask Siri a lot, not because their photos filled up. The Logic assistant runs on Google's Gemini model and has its own pack, so a heavy user may end up with two meters: one in iCloud+ and one in packs.
Apple keeps the free tier small for the same reason it kept iCloud at 5GB. A stored file costs little to keep. An AI request runs on a server and costs something each time, so a free allowance can never be generous for long.
Your own assistant spends a different allowance
Keynote, Pages and Numbers are also opening to outside assistants, such as Claude or ChatGPT. Those run on the plan you already pay that company, not on Apple's allowance. For heavy document work, you can choose which allowance to spend.
Whichever you use, do one real job in the app, then open the usage screen and read how much of the month it took. That number is your budget, and it will tell you more than the count on the support page.