How usage billing works
Prepaid balance, charged at direct processing cost times 1.5. This page is the whole policy.
The model
You add balance up front. When we produce an article, we charge the direct processing it required multiplied by 1.5. There is no subscription and no minimum.
What counts as direct cost
Only the processing an article actually consumed:
- Research and search queries
- Writing
- SEO review
- Image generation, when enabled
Our own retries, our own mistakes and our internal health checks are not billed to you. They are absorbed by us.
Reservations
Before an article starts, we reserve the most it could cost under your per-article limit. That amount is held, not spent. When the article finishes we charge what it actually cost and release the rest immediately.
This is why a job can never quietly exceed your limits: the money is committed before any work begins, and the reservation is the ceiling.
When something fails
- Publishing fails. The article is finished and saved. We retry delivery automatically, and re-sending costs nothing because no new work is involved.
- A duplicate delivery. Never charged twice. Each article carries an identifier your site matches on, so a retry finds the existing post instead of creating another.
- Partial generation. You are charged only for the stages that completed and produced output you keep.
- You cancel. Work already done is charged; everything reserved and unused is released.
- A processing timeout. If we genuinely cannot tell what a step consumed, it is flagged for manual reconciliation and not charged until resolved. We never estimate.
- You ask for a regeneration. That is new work, so it is chargeable — but only after we have shown you the estimate.
Corrections
Financial records are never edited. If something needs correcting, we add a compensating entry that reverses it, with a recorded reason. Your transaction history always shows what happened, including the correction.
Estimates versus charges
An estimate shown before an article runs is always labelled as an estimate. The settled amount appears separately once the article is finished. We never present one as the other.
Balance expiry
Purchased balance does not expire. If that ever changes, it will be stated on this page before it takes effect — our system will not apply an expiry policy that has not been disclosed here.