Money

Everything settles in USDC on Solana by default. Where the deployment enables them, a wallet payment can also settle in USDC on Base (x402 or MPP), and an MPP payment in a stablecoin on Tempo.

Two payment paths, one per request

x402 is the clean path. Your client signs a payment, a facilitator does the chain work, and USDC goes straight to the serving sharer. Aile touches no key and takes no platform cut on this path. It is buffered rather than streamed, because a settlement receipt is produced once when the call completes. Where the deployment enables MPP, the same 402 can be paid with an MPP credential instead, on the same terms. See Pay with a wallet.

Balance debit is the fallback for clients that cannot sign x402. You pre-fund USDC into your own embedded wallet; Aile reserves an estimate, commits the real cost, and settles to sharers in batches. Caller funds are never pooled server-side. The only account debited is your own.

The platform fee

On the balance path Aile takes 10%, and three things about it matter:

• It comes out of the sharer's share. It is never added to the caller's price.
• It is taken on every settlement; there is no opt-out.
• It is applied atomically at settlement, not accrued separately.

At $1.00 of list price on the balance path: the caller pays $1.00, the sharer keeps $0.90, Aile keeps $0.10.

The nodeless egress surcharge

A nodeless serve settles at 15%, not 10%: the base fee plus a 5% surcharge. It is cost recovery: on a node serve the sharer's machine carries the request, and on a nodeless serve Aile's own egress and proxy pool carry it instead.

The surcharge is resolved per-provider → global → deployment default (5%), so an operator can lower or zero it for a given provider. Anything at or above half is refused as a typo rather than applied. The caller's price is unchanged either way.

Waivers exist, but each one is a configuration fact: an x402-settled request (no cut on that path at all), an unset or invalid fee address, or a fee address that is the sharer's own or the caller's own. A fee must never be the reason a payout does not happen.

Top-ups

USDC, USDT, SOL and $AILE all credit at 0%. Deposit any of them to the address in your wallet; USDT, SOL and $AILE are swapped to USDC inside your own wallet and credited. A swap whose outcome cannot be confirmed is never retried: it shows as unconfirmed, grants no discount tab, and waits for someone to check it.

A card top-up carries a 5% fee on the USDC that arrives, moved on chain as the deposit lands, plus the payment provider's own fee. It is taken at the deposit rather than at the spend, so card-in, crypto-out pays it too. Aile pays the network fee for that transfer, so a card-funded wallet needs no SOL. If the fee cannot be moved, the deposit still credits in full.

Buy $AILE in the dashboard is the reverse direction, not a top-up: it spends USDC from your wallet on $AILE through Jupiter, with Aile paying the network fee. The purchase is listed as bought $AILE, never as a deposit, and grants no discount tab. The USDC it spends is held out of your spendable balance while the swap is in flight, and a buy whose outcome is unknown says so: check the balance before buying again.

$AILE has two roles, one per side of the trade

They are different mechanisms, and only one of them touches price.

For sharers: a payout asset

The election chooses the asset you are paid in: $AILE, or USDC.

The swap runs in a background sweep, deliberately not on the payout path, so a swap that cannot route never blocks a payment. It sells what was settled to you, net of the fee, through Jupiter inside your own wallet, and pauses while Aile's gas wallet runs low. An outcome it cannot confirm is never sold a second time. It changes the asset, never the destination: settlements pay the same wallet either way, and there is no stored payout-address field, by design.

For callers: a price discount, funded by Aile's own cut

A $AILE deposit credits USDC like any other asset and additionally grants a discount tab of the same value.

A request the tab covers is priced at 2% below list × margin, and the platform fee on it drops to a derived rate of about 8.163%.

At $1.00 of list:

If the configured fee rate is ever too small to fund the discount, the discount collapses to zero rather than being taken out of the sharer.

Per-unit endpoints (images, audio, video and the rest) bill at full price and leave the tab untouched.

The tab is only offered where Aile will collect a fee: a waived settlement would pay the sharer the already-discounted total, so the gate checks that at reservation time.

The burn earmark is a column on the debit row and a field in the result. The settlement transaction gains no extra leg, and the earmark cannot exceed the fee it comes from.

Only that earmark is ever burned, and it exists only on the $AILE-funded share. What Aile keeps as revenue — on every settlement, including the ordinary full-price one above — funds a separate buy-back that holds the $AILE it acquires in the treasury instead of destroying it. Both are background sweeps in their own transactions, run where the deployment enables them; neither is a settlement leg, and neither can delay a payout. What each has bought and burned is public on /stats and /tokenomics.

Each discounted request settles at the discount it was priced at, so a later change to the discount rate cannot leave a sharer behind the full-price path.

What controls your bill

The reservation is taken against the output ceiling your request authorises (max_tokens). The difference is refunded. So max_tokens is the lever where the route sends it upstream, though tools and thinking can raise that cap, and a key's balance is billed up to it. With none set, the quote assumes 4,096 output tokens and the charge follows the reported usage up to the cap the route actually sent (the context window if it sent none), bounded by the balance spendable at reservation. x402 always pays the quote, and a self-hosted serve bills at most the quote.

• One rate per request. The rate is fixed when the request is quoted and carried through hold and commit. Every failover attempt re-checks x-aile-max-price on the quote that bills.
• Input is estimated per model. Text at about four characters a token; images and PDF pages by the priced model's family (a Gemini page at 258 or 560 tokens, a Claude page at up to 7,784); Gemini video per second. Each estimate is capped at the context window and never below the text estimate.
• An attachment Aile cannot measure (a linked file, a PDF it cannot count, a linked video on Gemini) is forwarded and held at the model's whole context window. A balance that cannot cover that gets a 402 naming why; x402 refuses it with a 400, because an x402 payment has no refund.
• Long prompts. Once the prompt, cached tokens included, passes a model's long-context line, the whole request bills at that band, and x-aile-max-price is checked at it.
• Media tiers. Image output and audio bill at their own published rates, and the image share of a reservation is held at the image rate. A request that asks for audio output is quoted and held at the audio rate.
• Cache tiers. A cache read bills at the cache-read rate (never above input), a cache write at the published write rate (never below input). A reported cache write can take a capped request past x-aile-price.

1aile price gpt-5.2 --max-tokens 1024

Prices the next request across every sharer without sending it. See Spend & limits.

Wallets

Minted on first sign-in. The private key lives in the wallet provider's secure enclave, outside Aile's servers and the CLI. What Aile holds is signing authority: it can move your own funds on your behalf, which is how settlement, conversion and withdrawal work.

Key export is off unless the deployment enables it, so by default Aile is custodial and withdrawal is how funds leave. A reservation is a claim on your wallet rather than a payment, and a key taken out could empty the wallet before the sharer who served you is paid. Where export is enabled it takes the same second factor as a withdrawal and is refused (409) while anything is still owed or leaving the wallet.

Withdrawals take the destination at the moment you send. Nothing is kept on file, so there is no stored destination for anyone to redirect. Only spendable money can leave: your balance less what you owe for usage and less anything already on its way out (a withdrawal in flight, a $AILE buy). GET /wallet and the dashboard show that same spendable figure. A second withdrawal is refused while one from the last three minutes is still pending, and on Base or Tempo while an earlier one there can still land (up to 11 and 6 minutes).

A sharer paid on Base or Tempo also has an EVM wallet, with no export at all; those earnings leave by a withdrawal on that network. See Getting paid.

Payouts batch

A Solana fee can cost more than one small request is worth, so sharing earnings accumulate and settle together. The threshold, maximum age and sweep period are server settings that the CLI reads rather than guesses.

The first payout to each wallet is quoted as an amount rather than a countdown: it must open a USDC token account, which costs far more than a transfer, and no amount of waiting releases it. A payout that moves to a new wallet with no USDC account waits for that threshold again. Aile opens at most one new payout wallet every 30 days, your embedded wallet aside (a newer one waits until then), and does not reopen a wallet whose USDC account its owner closed; receiving any USDC there reopens it.