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Aether bills on a single unit: the credit. A credit buys workspace VM runtime — the time an agent’s machine is actively running. The LLM tokens an agent consumes are captured for usage reporting but are never billed.

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What a credit buys

Every workspace runs on one of three runtime classes. Each class has a fixed per-hour credit rate: Medium is the reference rate: 1 credit = 6 minutes of Medium VM active time (10 credits/hour). Credits are charged for active runtime only, prorated by the second.

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What consumes credits

Credits are debited for workspace VM runtime: Administrative grants and corrections appear under adjustment. Building or rebuilding a warm pool’s prewarmed environment does not spend credits, and there is no token-based charge anywhere in the system.
Token counts (in/out/total) are recorded per task, model, and agent and shown in the usage explorer, but they never affect your credit balance.

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Balance and ledger

Your credit balance is a signed ledger. Each entry is one credit transaction: Credits added
  • subscription_grant — your monthly tier allowance, granted each billing cycle
  • credit_pack_purchase — a one-time credit pack
  • promo_grant — promotional credits
  • admin_adjustment (positive) — manual grant
Credits removed
  • vm_runtime_debit — VM active time
  • expiration_debit — credit-pack credits that reached their expiry
  • refund_reversal — reversal of a refunded purchase
  • admin_adjustment (negative) — manual correction
Historical ledgers may contain snapshot_refresh_debit entries from the retired warm-environment billing model. Aether does not create new entries of this type. When you spend, credits are drawn from your subscription grant first, then from credit packs (earliest expiry first), then from promotional and admin grants. The billing projection reports your credits remaining.
Prints your plan, payment state, monthly credit grant, remaining or owed credits, and cycle end when available. aether billing balance is an alias for the same summary.
Usage shows current-cycle model usage. Billing shows your remaining or owed credits.

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Running a task costs credits

Starting a task spends VM-runtime credits, so each start passes through an admission gate before the agent runs. A task start is admitted only when all of these hold:
  • Your billing state is billable (an active or in-grace subscription).
  • You have at least 1 minute of spendable credit for that runtime class.
If any check fails, the task start is refused with one of:
The one-minute minimum prevents a near-zero balance from being immediately exhausted on launch. See Pricing & Tiers for runtime-class rates and credit packs.