The choice between paying and using an included entry appears only when three things are true at the same time. Your membership is active, you have at least one included competition entry left, and the competition you are registering for has at least one category that costs money. If any one of those is false, registration goes straight to the category list and payment, and says nothing about why.
Most often the reason is the first one people do not expect: not every membership includes competition entries.
Weekly and Monthly memberships include no entries
Included entries by plan:
| Plan | Price | Included competition entries |
|---|---|---|
| Institutional | $499 | 15 |
| Studio | $199 | 5 |
| Annual | $99 | 2 |
| Semester | $65 | 1 |
| Monthly | $18 | none |
| Weekly | $9 | none |
If you hold Monthly or Weekly, your membership is active and working, and nothing went wrong with your purchase. Those two plans are built around reading and using the platform rather than entering competitions, so on a paid competition you pay the entry fee in the same way as someone with no plan at all.
What the Monthly and Weekly plans do carry is worth being clear about: they remove the free-view limits on projects, journals and publications, they let you message any member directly, and they come with UNIfy render credits, 25 on Monthly and 7 on Weekly. Semester at $65 is the first plan that includes a competition entry, and it includes one.
You may have used the entries you had
Included entries are counted from the start date of the oldest membership you still hold, not from the day your latest one began. If you bought a second plan while the first was still running, the entries you used early in that first period still count against what you have now. Once you have used them all, the option stops being offered and paid registration is the remaining route.
Registering with an entry is what spends one. Simply registering for a free competition does not.
Free competitions never show the option
If every category on a competition costs nothing, there is nothing to choose between, so no selector is drawn. You register at no cost and your included entries are left untouched. That applies to every plan, including the two that include no entries, and to members with no plan.
Institution categories cannot be paid with an entry
Some competitions carry an Institution category alongside Professional and Student. That one is always paid for directly. If you select it while the membership option is chosen, registration switches back to payment and tells you so.
What it looks like when it is offered
When all three conditions are met, the registration window opens with a Choose Registration Method selector above the category list, showing how many entries you have left, and the membership route is pre-selected for you. Confirming registers you with no payment step.