Credits and cost units

A credit is an internal compute entitlement. It is not cash, cannot be transferred or resold, and is not a unit of energy. Prices per credit are not yet published; they will be set from measured unit costs.

What is metered

Each meter is recorded separately, with how it was measured:

Meter	Measurement
llm_input_tokens, llm_output_tokens	reported by the AI provider
cpu_seconds	measured run time of the simulation
storage_gb_days	modeled from export size and retention
hosted AI cost in USD	modeled from list prices, or recorded as unavailable

AI tokens, compute time, storage and energy are never added together or converted into each other.

Reservation and settlement

Before a run or review starts, Alive reserves its maximum cost (for runs, the full wall-time budget) from your balances in this order: sponsored credits that expire soonest, your plan's free allowance, then purchased credits. When it finishes, Alive settles measured usage, never more than the reservation, and returns the rest to where it came from. Work that fails because of Alive settles zero. Balances can never go negative.

GET /v1/credits/balance?org_id=… shows available, reserved, sponsored, allowance and wallet. The app also shows available credits in Settings. A newly created organization may have zero spendable credits until an administrator issues a pilot grant; a plan's listed monthly allowance is a limit, not a balance already issued.