PRICING
You never spend more than you chose¶
$5 of credit to start, no card. After that, one cent per governed operation. A spend ceiling is on from the day you sign up, and you can see it, change it, and be held to it.
What you pay for¶
| What | Meter code | Price |
|---|---|---|
| A governed operation | execution.operation |
$0.01 |
One line. EKKA does one thing: it decides whether an action is allowed, and proves it.
What you are never charged for¶
- A refusal. If EKKA says no, you pay nothing.
- A gate check. Deciding whether something is allowed is not billable work.
- Reading your own audit chain.
ekka audit verifyand every receipt check cost nothing, always. - A failed run. If work did not succeed, it is not counted.
- Your Enclave being connected. An always-on daemon is measured, never billed.
Hosted AI model usage¶
EKKA's hosted models are metered and capped per day. Token usage is not part of
your operation bill, and the daily quota means no run can build an unbounded
one. See the numbers with ekka org usage.
| What | Meter code | Charged | Per day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input tokens | llm.tokens.input |
not priced | 100,000 |
| Output tokens | llm.tokens.output |
not priced | 20,000 |
The AI gate is a separate product with its own price, so it does not draw on your EKKA credit. Your $5 is for exploring EKKA.
Bring your own key and you pay your provider directly. You still pay the operation price, because every operation crosses EKKA's control plane whether the model is ours or yours.
Your first $5¶
New organizations get $5 of credit, valid 90 days, and we do not ask for a card. At one cent per operation that is 500 governed operations.
When it runs out, work stops. Your organization is never overdrawn and never billed by surprise.
Adding credit
Credit is prepaid: you buy it, then work spends it. No invoice you did not ask for, and no card kept on file for automatic charges.
Credit is added to your organization by the EKKA team. Write to [email protected] to top up.
The ceiling you did not have to ask for¶
Every organization has a spend ceiling from day one. You did not opt in, and you do not have to remember it.
Your spend ceiling is $10 a day. In money, not in a count of something you would have to convert.
There are two kinds of ceiling and they answer different questions:
| Ceiling | What it bounds | Default |
|---|---|---|
spend.total |
money, across everything you are charged for | $10.00 a day |
execution.operation |
how many governed operations, whatever they cost | 1,000 a day |
execution.run |
how many plan runs. not priced | 200 a day |
The money ceiling is the one that caps your bill. The other two cap the rate, which is what stops a loop from burning a month of budget in an afternoon. 1,000 operations a day is at most $10 a day, so the two agree. The money ceiling is the one to read, because it stays true whatever an operation costs.
See yours, and change it:
$ ekka org limits
EKKA stops work when a ceiling is reached. These bound how much gets spent;
`ekka org edition` shows what can exist.
METER USED PERIOD SET BY
execution.operation 8 / 1000 day EKKA default
execution.run 40 / 200 day EKKA default
llm.tokens.input 0 / 100000 day EKKA default
llm.tokens.output 0 / 20000 day EKKA default
spend.total $0.08 / $10.00 day EKKA default
$ ekka org limits set spend.total 25
spend.total per day is now $25.00 (was EKKA's default).
Recorded in your audit log, and the organization's owner has been emailed.
check the record ekka audit list
For spend.total you type dollars, so set spend.total 25 is a twenty-five
dollar cap. For the other meters you type a count. Each row on that screen shows
its own unit, so read it first and type the same kind of number.
Lower it whenever you like. Raising it is an admin decision, it is written to
your own audit chain, and the owner is emailed even when the owner made the
change. Read it back with ekka audit list.
Past a ceiling, new work is refused and told which ceiling stopped it. Anything already running keeps running.
Self-hosting¶
Running EKKA yourself does not make it free. You pay per governed operation either way, because the governance is the product and it is the same control plane doing the same work.
What self-hosting changes is where your data and your credentials live, not whether the meter runs. See What leaves your machine.
Checking any of this yourself¶
Every number on this page is readable from the CLI.