Overview

R3CKON is a ledger for the environmental footprint of AI usage. It does three things, every month, for every account:

1. Meters your AI usage from metadata alone (models, token counts, regions).
2. Estimates the usage-phase water, carbon, and energy cost of that usage with a public, versioned methodology, always shown with its uncertainty range.
3. Retires third-party-issued environmental certificates against the conservative end of that estimate, and issues a certificate documenting exactly what was funded and what you may say about it.

The product is deliberately not a neutrality badge. The footprint is an estimate with a wide, honestly stated range; the retirements are exact, documented instruments. The ledger keeps the two sides related but never equated, and every claim the platform supports is an activity claim: what was estimated, what was funded, identified by project and vintage.

Who it is for

• Individuals who use AI heavily and want a real record rather than a feeling (Personal tier, self-report or API connections).
• Teams and AI-native products with API usage and, increasingly, customers or boards asking about AI's environmental cost (Team and Business tiers, managed provider connections).
• Enterprises with reporting obligations, negotiated volume, and audit support needs.

The loop, in one pass

• Usage arrives from managed provider connections (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google), from the metering API, or from self-report in the console. All three paths carry token metadata only; content-shaped payloads are rejected at the API boundary.
• The methodology converts usage into water (gallons), carbon (kg CO2e), and energy (kWh) estimates. Every figure carries a 90 percent plausible range, and every estimate stores the exact coefficient values used, so historical numbers stay reproducible forever.
• At each monthly close, the obligation accrues at the 90th percentile of the estimate range (P90) and whole registry units are retired against it: Water Restoration Certificates, carbon credits, and Renewable Energy Certificates. Buffer inventory is drawn first; supplier orders cover any shortfall.
• A four-section certificate documents confirmed retirements, the estimate that sized them, required disclosures, and the exact statements the record supports.

Glossary

• Billable tokens: fresh input + output + 10 percent of cached input. Reasoning tokens are a subset of output, so they are never counted twice. Tier caps count billable tokens, so cache-heavy workloads are not overcharged. This is a fixed billing rule, deliberately separate from the estimation methodology.
• P50 / P90 / the range: the methodology outputs a probability distribution, not a number. P50 is the median (central estimate). P90 is the retirement accrual basis: nine tenths of the probability sits below it. The whisker on every chart spans P05 to P95, the 90 percent plausible range.
• Retirement: permanently taking a registry instrument out of circulation, on your behalf. Retirements are whole units only; fractional obligations carry forward.
• Confirmed vs pending: a funded supplier order awaiting registry confirmation is pending. Certificates report confirmed retirements only; pending orders never support any public statement.
• Buffer: company-owned retired inventory drawn on before new supplier orders. Customers are never billed for buffer fills.
• Certificate-share floor: at least 50 percent of subscription revenue to date is spent acquiring certificates, measured cumulatively at actual supplier cost, trued up at each monthly close, and disclosed on the certificate.
• Usage-phase footprint: the metric covers inference only. Model training, hardware manufacturing beyond an amortized embodied-carbon adder, network transport, and end-user devices are out of scope and disclosed as such.

What this is not

• Not a neutrality claim. An estimate this uncertain cannot honestly be declared settled, so the platform never says it is, and the Terms license customers to say only what the record supports.
• Not a measurement. Providers do not disclose per-token energy or water. Figures are modeled estimates with stated ranges, per the methodology.
• Not always local. Projects live where they live. Restoring one watershed does not un-consume water in another, and certificates state project geography rather than implying it away.

Where to go next

• Quickstart: a working ledger in ten minutes.
• Connecting usage: the three ingestion paths.
• Metering API: the developer reference.
• Methodology: every constant, formula, and source.