Usage Metering & Billing Records
Last updated 19 Oct 2026
The core rule: one call, one record
Every AI call in ToRun produces exactly one BillingRecord with a complete pricing snapshot. This applies to chat turns, image/video/music generation, voice/realtime seconds, translation, moderation, deep-research steps, each council participant, and every AI step inside a workflow. Nothing is billed off a vague running total — each call is itemized.
What a Billing Record captures
Each record freezes the facts at the moment of the call, including:
- Price applied — the exact rate used (snapshotted from the pricing table), so later price changes never rewrite history.
- Fund source — where the money came from (see below).
- Currency snapshot — currency code and exchange rate at the time.
- Cost breakdown — per-dimension split (e.g. input vs output vs vision) where applicable.
- What triggered it — the source (chat message, workflow step, etc.).
Billing records are append-only and retained — failures add a sibling record rather than editing an existing one.
Where the money comes from (fund source)
| Fund source | Funds | Markup |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | Your plan's monthly allowance | none (allowance covers it) |
| Wallet | Your prepaid balance | ~20% markup baked into price |
| BYOK | Your own provider key, charged directly | none (a separate flat BYOK tier fee applies) |
| Override | Host-granted credit | none |
| Free | Daily free-tier allowance | none |
Allowance vs wallet
- Subscription allowance — a period-bound included budget that AI calls draw down first.
- Prepaid wallet — a top-up balance (you choose the amount) used for pay-per-call beyond allowance. Wallet-funded calls debit a matching wallet transaction, which reconciliation verifies.
Local compute metering
Work that runs on ToRun's own compute (for example media composition/merging with ffmpeg) is metered as compute-seconds and billed at the published compute rate — so local processing is transparent too, not free-but-hidden.
Payments
Subscriptions and top-ups are processed through Dodo Payments as Merchant of Record, which handles tax collection and remittance.
Seeing your costs
The cost of each message/operation is shown transparently. Daily usage and billing summaries are fed by event-driven rollups (not end-of-day batch jobs), so dashboards reflect recent activity.
Tips
- Bring your own key (BYOK) to pay the provider directly and skip the wallet markup — you pay only the flat BYOK tier fee.
- Watch allowance first, wallet second: allowance-funded calls carry no markup.
- For batch/automation, remember each call is its own record — a 100-step workflow is 100 line items, all itemized.