Pricing & fees

There are no seats, no minimums, and no subscription to Aile itself. You pay per token, from a balance you fund, and sharers are paid per token they serve. The non-chat endpoints bill per unit instead: see below.

What a caller pays

1price = list × margin

list is the provider's published rate for that model. margin is the multiplier the sharer set, from 0 (free) to 1 (list). No sharer charges above list, and a model with no published list price is not served. See Your rates. Different sharers quote different numbers for the same model, which is what makes it a market.

A request is priced on one rate, fixed when it is quoted, so a price change mid-request never moves its charge. Image output and audio bill at their own published rates where the model has them, which can be several times the text rate; a request that asks for audio output is quoted at the audio rate, so its quote covers a reply that is all audio.

Cached tokens bill the way the provider bills them. A cache read is charged at the model's cache-read rate, never above its input rate; a cache write at the published write rate, never below input (an Anthropic one-hour write is 2x input). GET /v1/models lists the most each can cost as max_usd_per_mtok_cache_read and max_usd_per_mtok_cache_write (the one-hour write where the route bills one). The market card shows the read and the five-minute write.

The platform fee is not added to this. It comes out of the sharer's share.

What a sharer keeps

The 10% applies to every balance-path settlement. Nothing elects out of it: choosing to be paid in $AILE changes only the asset you receive.

Waivers exist but are configuration facts rather than preferences: an x402 request takes no cut, and an unset, invalid, or self-referential fee address collects nothing.

Top-ups

USDC, USDT, SOL and $AILE all credit at 0%. USDT, SOL and $AILE are swapped to USDC inside your own wallet.

A card top-up is not free: Aile takes 5% of the USDC that arrives, and the payment provider charges its own fee on top. Aile pays the network fee for moving that 5%, so a card-funded wallet needs no SOL.

What $AILE does

It plays two roles, one per side of the trade, and only one touches price.

Sharers: payout asset. Choose to be paid in $AILE or USDC. There is no fee effect; it changes the asset, never the rate and never the destination. It is off by default.

Callers: a discount tab. A $AILE deposit credits USDC and grants a discount tab of the same value. Requests it covers are priced 2% below list × margin. Per-unit endpoints bill at full price and leave the tab untouched.

At $1.00 of list price:

Only the earmark is burned, and only the $AILE tab creates one. The revenue row funds a separate buy-back that holds the $AILE it buys in the treasury rather than destroying it — so the $0.10 column buys the token back too, it just does not reduce supply. Both run as background sweeps where the deployment enables them, never as a settlement leg. The running totals, bought back and burned, are public on /stats and /tokenomics.

Buying $AILE is not a top-up. The dashboard's Buy $AILE spends USDC from your wallet on the token. It shows as bought $AILE, credits nothing and grants no discount tab.

Staking changes no price you pay. A stake tier buys a free usage window. Where the operator runs it, an opted-in staker's unused window can discount other callers' balance-paid requests (see Rate limits › Stake-funded discount). A discounted request is all or nothing: you pay the staker the discounted price, Aile's stake pool pays the sharer its full price, and the 10% fee applies to both. GET /stake/discount shows what is left, rounded up to whole dollars (to $10 where Aile's own budget is the limit), and shows no figure while fewer than three stakers fund it. The discount never stacks with the $AILE tab, and never applies to x402, self-hosted capacity, or a request that pins a sharer, machine or account.

Long prompts

Some models charge more once a request's prompt passes a size, such as 200K tokens. Cached tokens count. The whole request is then billed at that rate. The model page lists it, and x-aile-max-price is checked against it.

Aile estimates the prompt before sending it: text at about four characters a token, images and PDF pages by the model's own formula. An attachment it cannot measure, such as a linked file, is held at the model's whole context window. If your balance cannot cover that, the 402 says so. You are billed on the usage the provider reports.

Controlling what you spend

Cap the ceiling. The reservation is taken against the max_tokens your request authorises rather than the reply you receive. The difference is refunded, but that number is the lever where the route sends it upstream; tools and thinking can raise that cap, and a key's balance is billed up to it. With no max_tokens the quote assumes 4,096 output tokens, but the charge follows the reported usage up to whatever cap the route sent (the context window if it sent none), bounded by your spendable balance. x402 pays the quote, and self-hosted capacity bills at most the quote.

Cap the price.

1x-aile-max-price: 8      # $8 per million tokens
2x-aile-max-price: 80%    # 80% of this model's published rate (higher of in/out)

Cap the key. A spend limit belongs to a key, so one runaway integration cannot spend what the rest of the account holds. A key's discount setting works like the % form above: a 20% discount admits only sharers at or below 80% of list, and refuses models with no published price.

Price before you send.

1aile price claude-opus-5 --max-tokens 1024

Sends nothing; quotes every sharer, cheapest first.

Non-chat endpoints

Each one bills in a single unit, at the model's list price per unit × the serving sharer's margin:

Embeddings and decisions are the exceptions: they bill per token. These endpoints are all nodeless, so the 15% row above applies on the balance path. A model with no published list price is refused by name rather than served at a guess.

Seeing what you spent

1aile spend

It counts your own served requests and keys them on the sharer's handle, so a sharer who was cheap but unreliable looks worse here than any listing can show.

The same view lives in the dashboard under Account → Usage.

Full details

Money covers the two payment paths, wallet custody, payout batching, and the burn earmark.