Credits & pricing

One cent per credit, a price floor nobody can undercut into a loss, and a split that survives any cost.

Two mechanisms carry the entire money model: credits, the unit everything is priced and spent in, and a price floor + split that makes every run profitable by construction rather than by hope.

Credits — one unit for everything

1 credit = 1 cent (US$0.01). Always. Everywhere.

💳 card   ┐
          ├──►  🎟️ credits (1¢ each)  ──►  ▶️ any agent
🪙 crypto ┘

Both doors buy the same credits into the same balance. A card needs nothing but a Google sign-in; crypto converts HBAR at the live market rate at the moment you pay. Hedera is the first chain supported, not the only one planned — each new chain becomes another top-up door, never a second balance.

Why credits instead of settling every run on-chain

	Per-run on-chain	Credits
One run	A settlement	A ledger number goes down
Chain fee per run	Every time	Zero
Latency	Seconds	Instant
500 bulk runs	500 settlements	One top-up
Who can buy	Someone holding crypto	Anyone with a card
Price stability	Moves with the exchange rate	It's already dollars

Ownership belongs on a ledger, permanently. Spending doesn't — putting a hundred-run afternoon on-chain adds cost and latency for nothing the buyer wanted, and it locks out everyone without a wallet, which is almost everyone.

The credit rules

Denominated in dollars, never in a coin. A price stored in HBAR would silently break the moment HBAR moved. Crypto amounts are computed at the moment of a transaction and never stored as the canonical price.

Stored as whole credits, as integers. Never floats. Floating-point arithmetic across six- and eight-decimal boundaries is exactly how a ledger quietly drifts out of balance over enough transactions.

One account, one balance, many wallets. A wallet is a device attached to an account, never a second identity with its own money. This is what keeps the model coherent when the second and third chain arrive.

Deduct first, run, refund on any failure. A failed run never keeps a buyer's credits, and a creator is only credited on a run that actually succeeded and was actually charged.

Getting money out

Earnings are withdrawable as HBAR by connecting a Hedera wallet, minimum 500 credits ($5), always to the wallet you're signed in with.

Not yet · card payouts

A creator who signed up with Google and never connected a wallet cannot cash out today. Card payouts need identity checks that aren't built. The earnings are safe in the balance; the door out isn't open yet.

The price floor

price = max( measured cost × 3 , $0.02 ) — when amnt pays for the run

Bring your own key, and the floor disappears

The floor exists to stop the platform paying more for a run than the buyer paid for it. If the run costs the platform nothing — because you supplied your own provider key — there is nothing to protect, so the floor is zero and you may price the agent at anything, free included.

That applies to the three connectors that use your key: AI Model, HTTP API and MCP Tool. Everything platform-paid (images, the Hedera connectors) keeps the cost×3 rule below.

Costs are measured by real executions, never estimated. When you publish, amnt runs your agent three times for real and prices it from what those runs cost. A lookup table would be wrong for most configurations — the creator's locked settings (model, quality, size, count) move the real cost far more than the agent's type does.

The 2¢ absolute minimum exists because very cheap outputs — short text especially — can cost fractions of a cent, at which point transaction overhead alone would exceed the sale.

The floor is enforced twice on purpose: in the publish screen, so a creator sees the number before trying to undercut it, and as a database constraint, so no other path — an admin tool, a manual fix, a route added later — can publish an agent into a guaranteed loss.

The split — costs come off first

A flat percentage of the gross price breaks the moment an agent is expensive to run. At a 3.7¢ floor with a 1.2¢ cost, only 2.5¢ is left, and 70% of the gross (2.6¢) is already more than that. So costs are subtracted first and the split applies to what's left:

Buyer pays        $0.10
├── 🔧 real cost  $0.021    ← measured, never guessed
└── 💰 profit     $0.079
     ├── 💚 creator (owner)   $0.055    70%
     ├── 🏢 platform          $0.020    25%
     └── 🔌 connector         $0.004     5%

What 70% actually means

70% of the profit, not 70% of the price. On a 30¢ run that costs 10¢ of AI, the owner keeps 14¢ — not 21¢. Any other reading pays out more than came in on any agent with a real cost behind it.

The same rule holds whether a run costs $0.002 or $0.80 — one formula, not a table of special cases per agent type. The connector's 5% goes to whoever built the building block the agent uses; see Connectors.

There's a second product on the same floor logic: unlocking a recipe outright, a one-time purchase that puts it in the buyer's own studio to run at their own cost forever. Its floor is 20× the per-run price — see Creators → Pricing & unlock.

What publishing costs

Nothing. Building, testing, pricing and publishing an agent are free, and none of them touch a wallet. amnt absorbs the three real test runs.

The one thing that costs money is the optional step of owning your agent as an NFT, and that fee goes to the network rather than to amnt. See Ownership.

Full detail on the invariants this is built to: Platform → Money rules.