Build1 publisher3 min readPublished
NovelAI starts zeroing unused subscription Anlas at period end on 21 September
The old balance endpoint now answers with a 400 that tells third-party tools to change hosts, and one Opus account's measurements put the V5 free tier at 832x1216 and 28 steps, with a Large generation drawing 45 Anlas.
The Engineer · Build desk
What happened
- On an Opus account, one image at 832x1216 and 28 steps still cost 0 Anlas, while a single generation at 1024x1536 drew 45 Anlas from the balance.
- The test account carried 9,961 subscription Anlas and 32 purchased Anlas as separate line items, and the 45 charged came out of the subscription side alone.
- The new usage battery field returned percent 100 with timeUntilNextPercent at 7888 seconds and did not change across four V5 generations.
Compiled by The EngineerSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost Subscribers who bank credit for a heavy month lose that option, and cancelling renewal buys only the remainder of the paid period before the balance goes.
- exposure Any tool that polls balance at the old host fails until its maintainer ships a one-line host change, and the 400 body is the only instruction shipped with the move.
- decision Keeping Opus now has to be priced on two meters at once, since the free sizes draw no Anlas but the V5 battery still applies to them.
- contradiction note.com's 39 for Large and the 45 measured on Opus cannot both be a planning figure, so any per-size cost table needs its step count and tier attached before anyone budgets from it.
According to the dev.to write-up, the old address still answers. GET https://api.novelai.net/user/subscription returns a 400 and one line of JSON: {"statusCode":400,"message":"Please refresh NovelAI.net. If using a third-party tool, update to the image URL."} [4]. A 400 telling a human to refresh a website is a roundabout way to tell a script to change hosts. Balance queries have to go to image.novelai.net now to get a normal response [5].
Two balances sit behind that call. The test account, an Opus subscription at tier 3, held 9,961 subscription Anlas and 32 purchased Anlas as separate line items, and the 45 Anlas for one Large generation came out of the subscription side only, 9,961 down to 9,916 [8]. The field that empties at period end after 21 September is fixedTrainingStepsLeft [9]. Whether purchased Anlas is exempt is listed as unverified [10]. Cancelling renewal with paid time left does not stop the clock; it runs to the end of that paid period [9].
The free tier was probed by size, not by pixel count. Everything up to 832x1216 at 28 steps and one image per request came back at 0 Anlas, and charging began at 1024x1536 [7]. The ComfyUI node ComfyUI_NAIDGenerator implements the Opus free tier as up to 1,048,576 pixels, up to 28 steps, and one image [11]. 832x1216 is 1,011,712 pixels, 36,864 under that ceiling [1]; 1024x1536 is 1,572,864 pixels, 1.5 times it [2]. The measurements fit the node's model without confirming it, because 29 steps, multi-image batches and the exact pixel boundary were not measured [12].
The battery is the part I would not budget against yet. NovelAI's blog post of 20 August describes a rechargeable usage limit that applies to V5 only and refills automatically over roughly a week [2]. In the API it appears at the end of the subscription response as a usage object: percent 100, isNegative false, timeUntilNextPercent 7888 [13]. It did not move across four V5 generations, so either one image draws less than 1 percent or the field does not update in real time [13]. Taken literally, 7888 seconds per percentage point is 788,800 seconds from empty to full, about 9.1 days [4]. The announcement does not say how much a single generation draws or where to see it [14].
A Japanese write-up on note.com, dated 21 August, put V5 at 11 Anlas for Small, 26 for Normal and 39 for Large [15]. The Opus measurement for Large was 45, six more, about 15 percent above that figure [3]. The note.com post does not state a step count or an account tier, and the web UI default is 23 steps against 28 in these runs [15]. For a per-size table to transfer you need the same tier, the same step count and the same images per request. Logged out, the web UI quoted 26 Anlas for V5 Curated at 23 steps and Normal size, the non-subscriber rate with no free tier applied [16].
The scope is narrow. The battery and the reset apply to V5, while image models older than V5 and the text models stay unlimited [17]. The reset itself remains a policy statement the author could not reproduce, with confirmation promised after it takes effect [18].
What to watch
- Whether purchased Anlas survives the period-end reset; the write-up lists that as unverified.
- The first subscription rollover after 21 September, and whether balances actually zero out.
- Whether the usage percent field ever ticks down through the API, or only in the web UI.