# Overview R3CKON is a ledger for the environmental footprint of AI usage. > Free accounts are open today. Paid tiers, which add certificate retirements, are not yet on sale. 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**, on paid plans, a fixed monthly basket of third-party-issued environmental certificates, and issues a certificate documenting exactly what was funded and what you may say about it. The basket is set by the plan, not by the estimate. 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 separate and never compares or nets them, 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 CSV upload). - **Teams and AI-native products** with API usage and, increasingly, customers or boards asking about AI's environmental cost (Team and Business tiers, SDK capture or a sync script). - **Enterprises** with reporting obligations, negotiated volume, and audit support needs. ## The loop, in one pass - Usage arrives from your own code, from a sync script you run, from a scoped Google connection, from a CSV upload, or from self-report in the console. Every path carries token metadata only; content-shaped payloads are rejected at the API boundary. We never accept a credential that can change anything in your provider account, which is why Anthropic and OpenAI are served by a script you run rather than a key you hand over. - 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, each paid plan's fixed basket is ordered: Water Restoration Certificates, carbon credits, and Renewable Energy Certificates. Company-owned inventory is drawn first; supplier orders cover the rest. Personal plans pool and round up to whole units. - The certificate documents confirmed retirements, the plan's basket, the period's estimate (labelled as information that did not size the retirements), 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 90th percentile: nine tenths of the modeled probability sits below it. It is a point on the range, not a guarantee and not what retirements are sized from. The whisker on every chart spans P05 to P95, the 90 percent plausible range. - **Accrual basis**: the figure a backfill quote is sized from. Where your usage is metered this is simply P90, as above. Where part of your usage is modeled or projected rather than recorded, the two come apart on purpose: the range you are shown widens to reflect that you told us you were unsure, but the accrual basis stays at P90 of the METHODOLOGY's uncertainty taken at the central estimate of your usage. The reason is that we choose how much a vague answer widens the range, and a customer who admits uncertainty should not owe more than one who does not on the same evidence. - **Retirement**: permanently taking an instrument out of circulation, in R3CKON LLC's name for your benefit. Retirements are whole units; pooled plans hold a share of a whole unit. - **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, unretired inventory drawn on before new supplier orders. Customers are never billed for it, and it is not customer property until retired for an account. - **Retirement basket**: each paid tier retires a fixed monthly basket, published on the pricing page. How sizes were chosen: [methodology](/methodology#how-basket-sizes-were-chosen). Mechanics: [Billing](/docs/billing). - **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): every way in, and why we refuse admin keys. - [Metering API](/docs/metering-api): the developer reference. - [Methodology](/methodology): every constant, formula, and source.