Billing and credits

Your factory runs on credits. Every billable action an agent takes — a model call, a web search, a few other metered tools — costs credits, computed from what the action actually consumed after it ran, never from an estimate.

Credits are the only unit you have to think about. The balance in your control room is the truth: it updates in real time and it is what gates work.

The free trial

A new factory starts with a 15-day free trial and a grant of trial credits. No card.

The trial grant is a hard cap. When it runs out — or when the 15 days elapse — billable work stops rather than rolling over into a bill. Nothing is deleted and nothing is lost: your spec, tickets, products and history stay exactly where they are. Only new billable actions pause.

That is deliberate. A trial that quietly becomes an invoice is a bad surprise, so a trial factory cannot spend past its grant no matter how much work is queued.

Buying credits

Top up from the control room’s credits screen. Purchases are prepaid at a 20% discount: you pay for a bundle and receive 25% more credit value than the cash price, as a purchased balance plus a bonus balance.

Prepaid credits roll over — they do not expire at the end of a month. Older credit is spent first, so nothing sits stranded behind a newer top-up.

Your first completed purchase converts the factory from trial to paid.

After you convert

Once you are a paying customer:

• Your prepaid credits are applied automatically against what you use. You will see them on your invoice as credit applied before tax.
• Usage beyond your credit balance is metered and invoiced at the end of the billing period, at the standard per-credit rate. If you would rather stop than overspend, ask support to disable overage for your factory and it will hard-stop at zero instead.
• Receipts and invoices come from Stripe, to the email on your account.

Seeing where credits go

The control room shows your balance, your burn rate, and a breakdown of spend by model, tool and seat, so a surprising number always has an explanation behind it. The same breakdown is available from the CLI:

sapient status

Credits are a normalized unit, not raw tokens: the breakdown shows what each kind of action cost you rather than provider token math.

Common questions

Do unused credits expire? Prepaid credits roll over. Trial credits do not — they expire with the trial.

Can I be charged during the trial? No. The trial grant is the cap; there is no card on file and no invoice.

What happens if my balance hits zero? Billable work pauses (or bills as overage if you have converted and overage is enabled). Everything already built stays intact, and topping up resumes work where it stopped.