# 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](/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](/docs/quickstart): a working ledger in ten minutes.
- [Connecting usage](/docs/connecting-usage): the three ingestion paths.
- [Metering API](/docs/metering-api): the developer reference.
- [Methodology](/methodology): every constant, formula, and source.