# Billing

One flat monthly subscription per tier, and every month the tier retires
a FIXED basket of certificates sized above the estimated footprint of
the tier's entire token allowance. Use a tenth of your allowance and the
basket still retires whole: your retirements meet or exceed the
conservative (P90) end of your estimate, every month, by construction.
No per-credit charges, no top-up lines, nothing indexed to estimate
size.

> Free accounts are open today. Paid tiers, which add certificate retirements, are not yet on sale. Tiers may change before launch.

## Tiers

| Tier | Price | Billable tokens / month | Retirements |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10M | Estimates only |
| Personal Light | $3/mo (billed annually, $36) | 5M | 150 gal / 75 kg / 150 kWh monthly, pooled shares |
| Personal | $7/mo | 25M | 475 gal / 230 kg / 425 kWh monthly, pooled shares |
| Personal Plus | $12/mo | 60M | 1,150 gal / 550 kg / 1,050 kWh monthly, pooled shares |
| Personal Max | $26/mo | 100M | 1,900 gal / 900 kg / 1,700 kWh monthly; Team's basket with the record in an individual's name |
| Team | $26/mo | 100M | 1,900 gal / 900 kg / 1,700 kWh monthly |
| Business | $250/mo | 1B | 19,000 gal / 9,000 kg / 17,000 kWh monthly |
| Enterprise | Custom | Above 1B | Negotiated volume, named projects |

Personal tiers come in echelons because individual usage spans three
orders of magnitude: casual chat runs under 1M billable tokens a month,
while a developer running coding agents most of the day can pass 100M.
All personal echelons pool: whole certificates are retired at the
registry and each account holds a fractional share naming the real
retirement reference.

## Billable tokens

Tier caps count billable tokens, not raw tokens:

```
billable = fresh input + output + 10% x cached input
```

Cache reads cost providers about a tenth of the compute, and counting them
like fresh tokens would overcharge exactly the teams that engineered their
usage well. The 10 percent rate is a fixed billing rule, deliberately
separate from the estimation methodology: revising a methodology
coefficient can change an estimate, never your bill.

**Cache-heavy example**: 4,000M tokens tracked, 93 percent cache reads.
Billable = 280M fresh and output + 372M (10 percent of 3,720M cached) =
652M, which fits the Business tier despite four billion raw tokens.

**Reasoning-heavy example**: 60M input + 30M output (of which 25M are
reasoning tokens), no caching. Billable = 90M, which fits the Team tier.
Reasoning tokens are a reported subset of output tokens, so they are
already inside the output count and are never added again; they matter to
the footprint estimate, not to the bill.

## Why tokens, never footprint

Your bill depends only on token counts you can audit from your provider's
own reporting. No coefficient in the methodology can influence revenue, so
the estimates stay honest and so does the price.

## The retirement basket

Your tier's basket is pinned in writing: fixed quantities per category,
published on the pricing page, sized above the accrual-basis footprint
of your full token allowance in every category (as of the stated
methodology version and supplier pricing). It retires every month you
are subscribed, independent of usage; fractional remainders carry on
your ledger until they retire whole, so the books stay exact.  Baskets
are reviewed when the methodology version changes or supplier pricing
moves, may only grow or hold within your paid term, and changes apply
prospectively with notice. The basket is a defined product allowance,
not a representation about footprint coverage, which is governed by the
estimate basis stated on the certificate.

## At the cap

Estimation continues past the cap; nothing is gated or interrupted.
Retirements accrue up to the cap, and sustained billable usage above it
moves you to the next tier at the following billing period, with notice.
The certificate always states the token volume the period's retirements
were accrued against.

## Managing the subscription

The Manage billing button in the console opens the Stripe customer portal:
card changes, invoice history, and cancellation. If service lapses, your
AI tools are unaffected (the platform never touches your traffic); the
ledger simply stops accruing retirements, and your history and
certificates remain accessible.

## Annual billing

Personal Light bills annually by default ($36/year), so payment
processing fees never consume a small fee. Annual billing with two
months of fee waived is available on Team and Business; write to
info@r3ckon.com.