Pricing
$5 to start. Then billed in joules.
A small hold lets you spin up workloads immediately. After that you pay for the energy your code actually consumed at the silicon — nothing for idle, nothing for over-provisioning, nothing for time you didn't use.
Reference energy per request
Energy is the unit of account. Different request shapes cost different amounts of energy. As a rough orientation:
| Class | Example | Energy |
|---|---|---|
| L0 — lookup | cache hit, key-value read, small embedding | ~0.01 J |
| L1 — extraction | short summarization, classification | ~0.05 J |
| L2 — aggregation | RAG query, mid-context summarization | ~0.3 J |
| L3 — reasoning | long-context reasoning, code generation, planning | ~6 J |
These are typical figures, not contracts. Every response carries the real number for that specific request in the X-Energy-Joules header, and your bill is the sum of those real numbers.
Top-up methods
Add balance to your account using any of:
- Stripe — card, SEPA, ACH
- USDC on Base L2
- Reward points — airline miles, hotel points, credit-card rewards (via Bakkt and Points.com networks)
Top-ups vs auto-recharge
You can either top up manually or set an auto-recharge threshold in the portal — when your balance drops below the threshold, we add a fixed amount via your chosen rail. Auto-recharge can be disabled at any time.
Billing transparency
The bill is a list of receipts. Every line is a real request or workload run, with the joule count, the silicon it ran on, the local grid carbon intensity at that moment, and a cryptographic signature. You can export the ledger in CSV or sign it through to your auditor.
Refunds & balances
Unused balance on a paid top-up is refundable until it's burned. USDC top-ups settle on Base L2 — refunds return to the originating wallet. Reward-point top-ups are non-refundable to the originating point program (point programs forbid that) but unused balance can be applied to any future workload.
Free tier?
There is no daily-free-joules tier at launch. The $5 hold gets you onto the cloud immediately; you can run a meaningful amount of work before exhausting it.
Builder credits
If you're an early-stage startup, non-profit, or open-source project, talk to us about the Joule Credits program — tiered credits beyond the $5 hold, granted by program, on a no-card basis. Email [email protected] with a one-paragraph description of what you're building.
Pricing details — top-up minimums, auto-recharge thresholds, refund SLAs — are managed in the portal and are subject to update before v1 GA. The framing above is the durable model.