What you earn, and what it costs
One rate card, applied to measured consumption. You recover part of a bill you were going to pay anyway; a buyer pays under list because the capacity was already bought; Shaidle earns only when a job actually settles. Nobody pays a subscription on top of a subscription.
How a dollar of list price splits
Credited per settled job and held for a short window before it can be withdrawn. This is a ceiling as well as a rate: a seat that reaches its recovery cap stops being schedulable.
Charged per token against prepaid credit, at the provider's own published rate for the exact model. No seat, no monthly minimum, no charge when nothing runs.
The spread between the two legs. It pays for routing, metering, settlement and the workspace the job runs in. There is no listing fee, no withdrawal fee and no platform subscription.
What your account earns
You are paid for capacity actually served, at 65% of the provider's list price for the model that ran. Two things about that number are worth being precise about, because they are the ones people get wrong:
- It is a share of the provider's list price, not of what the buyer paid. Measured against the buyer's charge it works out slightly higher, but list price is the anchor and the ledger uses it.
- It is a ceiling per seat, not only a rate. A seat can recover at most 65% of what the subscription behind it is worth, and once it gets there it leaves the schedulable pool for the cycle.
- Your own work always wins. Drain mode stops new routing immediately and lets in-flight work finish.
- Earnings sit in a held state before withdrawal, so a reversal is still possible while it matters.
Payouts settle on their own rails against a supplier invoice — never out of the card processor's balance. Before you connect an account, read where your account stands, including the risks that come with listing a seat.
What a buyer pays for
- Tokens, priced per model against the provider's own published rate — not a flat blended rate that quietly overcharges on cheap models.
- Prepaid credit. You top up, you draw down, and you can see every job that moved the balance.
- No charge for idle time, no seat minimum, and no monthly commitment to cancel.
- Failover across accounts and providers at no extra cost — if the account serving you runs out mid-task, the exchange moves the work.
Every routed request lands in your history with its model, its token counts, what it cost and what the same request would have cost at list price. The saving is shown per job rather than asserted on a marketing page.
Cloud workspaces
A cloud workspace — the isolated environment where an agent job runs, with its own filesystem and git remote — is free while the platform is new. Tokens are billed as above; the machine the work happens on is not.
That will change. Workspaces run on compute we rent by the hour, and a free tier that scales is a bill that scales with it, so we expect to introduce a paid tier — most likely for sustained or larger sessions, with something modest staying free. When it happens you will be told before you are charged, not after, and nothing you have already paid for changes retroactively.
Questions people actually ask
- What does it cost me to list a seat?
- Nothing. There is no listing fee, no withdrawal fee and no platform subscription. Shaidle earns the 15% spread when a job settles and nothing at any other time — if nothing runs on your account, nobody is charged anything.
- When do I actually get paid?
- Earnings are credited per settled job and held for a short window before they can be withdrawn, which is while a reversal is still possible. Payouts settle weekly, against a supplier invoice on their own rails.
- Is there a subscription?
- No. The whole point is not paying a subscription on top of a subscription. You buy credit, you spend credit.
- Why is it cheaper than going direct?
- Because the capacity was already paid for and was going to expire unused. The discount is not subsidised by us and it does not depend on us raising money — it comes out of capacity that would otherwise be worth nothing at the end of the cycle.
- What happens if my credit runs out mid-job?
- The job stops at the point your balance does, and you are charged for what actually ran. Nothing is served on credit you have not bought.
- Which providers can I buy from?
- Claude and Codex at launch. Lanes we cannot serve properly are refused on the server rather than advertised and then declined.
- Do you mark up the model rate card?
- No. Prices are the providers' own published rates per model; our revenue is the 15% spread and nothing else. A model missing from the rate card is a bug we treat as a billing incident, not a pricing opportunity.