Pricing & fees
The venue takes a flat cut of the fill, split across the two sides of it. It does not mark up the spread, and it does not take a cut of the escrow it is holding.
Current mid prices
Per million output tokens. Hosted is the nearest listed model at a managed provider.
| Contract | Mid | Hosted | Provider nets |
|---|
Where the hosted number comes from
The Hosted column is a published output price, not our estimate. We anchor to the nearest listed model on Ollama's price sheet, cross-checked against DeepSeek's, whose v4-flash tier lists $1.32 per million output tokens at peak and half that off-peak.
Read those sheets and the first surprising thing is how flat they are. An 8B and a 70B are separated by a factor of roughly two and a half, not by the factor of nine their parameter counts suggest. Managed providers batch aggressively: the weights are read from memory once per forward pass and produce a token for every request in flight, so a large model's cost is spread across dozens of concurrent streams. The book prices against those numbers, not against a markup we picked.
Escrow
Posting a bid places a hold of size × limit on your funded balance, plus the 2% buyer fee on that amount, so the hold covers the worst case the order could cost you. It is not a charge and it is not spent. Cancelling releases it immediately, and a partial fill releases the unfilled remainder.
Because a bid fills at the ask rather than at its own limit, the hold is almost always larger than the eventual charge. That difference comes back to you.
What a job actually costs
Output tokens only. Prompt tokens are not billed, because prefill is compute-bound and cheap relative to decode, and metering it separately doubles the surface for disputes without changing the number much.
The count used is the venue's, produced by re-tokenising the response. The node's own report is recorded for comparison but never billed from — see verification.
You pay for output whether or not the completion ran to the end. A stream you abort, one the serving node drops halfway, and one cut short at its token ceiling are all billed for exactly the tokens that reached you and refunded the rest of the hold — a short answer is never a full charge. Which of those happened is on finish_reason; the API reference spells out each and when a follow-up request is worth sending.
Payouts
What a job earns is credited to your venue balance the moment it settles, and you can see it on your account immediately. Once your earnings reach $50.00 you can request a payout to a Bitcoin address you nominate, from the host page or the funding page. The same threshold covers host earnings and referral commission. Below it the network fee would eat most of the payout, which is the only reason a floor exists.
Only what you earn here can be paid out. Money you deposited buys compute and stays on the venue: taking coin in at one address and paying it out at another is a money transmission business, and this is a compute market instead. So the payout figure on your account is your fills and referral commission net of the venue’s cut, less anything already requested — not your whole balance.
Requesting debits your balance straight away, so the money is out of reach while the request is open and cannot be spent or claimed twice. The coins are sent afterwards: every payout is reviewed and signed by a person, offline. Nothing about moving real Bitcoin is automated here, and that side is still being built — so treat the turnaround as manual and unhurried rather than same-day. If a request is rejected the balance returns in full as a visible credit on your ledger, not a silent reversal.
There is no bond and nothing is staked or slashed. Earlier versions of this page said otherwise; that was wrong and has been removed rather than quietly softened.
How the fee is split, and what it pays for
The venue charges 2% to the buyer and 3% to the provider, booked as two separate ledger rows so each side can see exactly what it paid. The weighting is deliberate: buyers have an obvious alternative in the hosted API they are already using, so their side is kept as thin as it can be while still being real. Providers are selling capacity that would otherwise earn nothing at all, and 97% of something beats 100% of an idle card.
What the house collects is not margin skimmed off a match and forgotten. It funds the things that make the venue worth routing through in the first place: keeping the exchange and its settlement path online, paying people to investigate disputed jobs and failed audits, and staffing support so a host with a node that will not register or a buyer with a job that stalled can talk to a human.
The fee is a transfer, not a burn. Every micro-USD taken off either side is credited to the house account inside the same ledger, which is why the fee column sums to zero across the whole book and the venue's revenue is a balance you can audit rather than a number reconstructed by subtraction.