A project failed — what happens to my credits?

Pipelines can fail. AI providers go down, image generation hits a content filter, Etsy rejects a draft listing, a network blip kills an upload mid-flight. Elistit’s worker chain is designed so that none of these cost you credits unfairly.

What happens automatically

When any worker in the chain raises an unrecoverable error:

The job status is set to FAILED.
The worker calls _refund_credits() — your credits are returned to your balance with a REFUND_CREDIT transaction in the ledger.
The project page shows the failure state.

You don’t need to do anything to get the refund. It’s automatic. You’ll see it in your credit history within a few seconds of the failure.

Retries

Most workers retry up to 3 times with backoff intervals of 10 seconds, 30 seconds, and 60 seconds. A transient failure (one bad request, a momentary API outage) usually resolves on retry without you noticing. The project just takes a bit longer.

You only see “Failed” on the project page once all three retries have been exhausted.

When the pipeline is “stuck” but not failed

Sometimes a project sits at a stage like processing or delivering for an unusually long time without progressing or failing. This is usually one of:

A worker is genuinely still running — large clipart bundles can take 10-15 minutes.
A worker crashed in a way that didn’t trigger the retry path.

If a project has been on the same stage for more than 30 minutes, contact support. We have a recovery worker (pipeline_recovery) that can detect and recover stuck pipelines, but it’s safer to alert us so we can confirm rather than guess.

What to include when contacting support

Send [email protected] with:

Project ID — the public_id from the URL of the project page (looks like 01HJ9X5Z...).
What you expected — usually obvious, but worth one line.
When you launched — approximate is fine.
Whether you’ve already been refunded — check the credit history before writing in.

We can read the worker logs and tell you within a working day what failed and why.

Edge cases the refund doesn’t cover

A handful of operations don’t go through the refund path. These are unusual but worth knowing about:

Project deleted manually — if you delete a project mid-flight via the project page, credits already spent are not returned. Don’t delete unless you’re sure.
Approval gate timeout — clipart and sticker projects sit at awaiting_approval until you act. The credits stay deducted because generation already happened. Approve or delete.
Etsy draft creation failure — if the rest of the pipeline succeeds but only the Etsy draft step fails, the generation/processing credits are not refunded (you have the files). The Etsy listing can be retried separately or skipped.

How the credit system works — what counts as deductible, what’s free.
How credits are used per tool — full cost breakdown by action.