We rebuilt first-run onboarding around a concrete number: ~$5 of credits on day one (~100 at our $5/100 pack rate). Pick a goal, preview the team Cloudia will build, and she starts working before the shell tour catches up.
Under that, we shipped a $5 starter pack for 100 purchased credits, fixed earn milestones so hire defaults do not steal your bonuses, and tightened CloudAxis Coding notifications when CI auto-fix runs out of retries.
Day one now unlocks ~$5 of credits before your first duty runs
Before this week, Free signup said "100 credits" in small text and left you guessing what that bought. A competitor scan, a browser session, and a few Cloudia turns could burn through the month before you understood how duties worked. Many people closed the tab thinking the free tier was a demo, not a workspace.
Now the welcome screen shows an animated credit unlock meter: 50 AI credits every month as your base (~$2.50 at our pack rate), then +10 for verifying email, +5 for daily check-in, +20 when you add your first duty, and +15 when you add a duty on a specialist you hired. Typical first session: ~100 credits total — about $5 of runway. The meter fills as you complete each step, so you see the balance grow instead of reading a static bullet list.
The goal step shows a live team blueprint before you commit. Pick "competitors" and you see Jordan the scout and Riley the watchdog with their duties named — not a generic "we will help you automate." The CTA becomes "Build this team →". On handoff, Cloudia auto-sends the starter prompt for your goal (competitor brief, inbox digest, social plan) so Chat opens with work in motion, not an empty composer. We delay the shell spotlight tour by 2.8 seconds so Cloudia can start before the UI draws attention elsewhere.
Why this matters for how CloudAxis works: credits are the fuel for browser minutes, tool calls, and scheduled duties. The earn path nudges you through the actions that make the OS stick — verify email, add a real duty, put it on a specialist. That is the same loop agencies use: hire a specialist, schedule a duty, read the output in ~/files/ Monday morning. We wrote about the duty model in scheduling agents 24/7; onboarding now walks you into that pattern instead of leaving you in a chat box.
Honest limits: 50/month is your monthly allowance on Free — the ~100 figure is a typical day-one total from milestones, not 100 credits deposited instantly at signup. Hire-default duties from Cloudia no longer trigger earn bonuses; only duties you add yourself count. That fix shipped this week after we noticed weekly review presets were granting "first duty" credit to everyone who accepted the default team.
Also shipped
Smaller changes that landed in the same window:
- $5 starter pack. Buy 100 AI credits once via Stripe Checkout — no subscription. Status bar and billing surfaces show "Buy credits" when the pack is configured. Good for stretching a Free month after you have tried the earn path.
- Grok Imagine. xAI Grok Imagine is now a selectable image and video generation provider for agents with the media_gen skill — another option beside existing image/video backends when specialists need creatives.
- Growth-only Stripe trial. The 7-day free trial on checkout applies to Growth only; Pro and Max bill immediately. Cloudia's prompt was updated so she does not promise trials on every tier.
- CloudAxis Coding CI honesty. Failed merge attempts after CI auto-fix now include root-cause detail in notifications. Session provenance appears in the PR body. Pending CI merge attempts are retryable without burning your approval slot, and duplicate merge proposals are deduped when auto-fix runs again.
- Coding UI. "New conversation" stays visible in the session list; follow-up messages refresh the list and clear stale reconnect notes.
- Mobile signup. Email field on auth uses the correct keyboard type on phones — fewer typos on the verify-email milestone.
What's next
We are watching day-one completion rates on the new unlock meter and blueprint preview. CloudAxis Coding beta continues — more language toolchains and monorepo detection are still on the build-machine list from last month's Coding launch.
Frequently asked questions
Do I get 100 credits instantly at signup?
You get 50 AI credits as your monthly Free allowance, then earn more through milestones in your first session — verify email, check-in, add duties. Typical day-one total is ~100 credits (~$5 value at our pack rate).
How does the $5 pack differ from earn credits?
Earn credits count toward your earn-storage cap on Free. Purchased pack credits are separate overflow balance — useful when you want 100 more without upgrading to Growth.
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