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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 four 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 two kinds of work: Administrative grants and corrections appear under adjustment. Nothing else debits credits — 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
  • snapshot_refresh_debit — warm-slot snapshot rebuild
  • expiration_debit — credit-pack credits that reached their expiry
  • refund_reversal — reversal of a refunded purchase
  • admin_adjustment (negative) — manual correction
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 balance card reports your credit limit, credits used, and credits remaining for the current cycle.
Prints your remaining credits plus a recent-activity ledger (task, credits, VM size, active seconds, timestamp).

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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).
  • Your tier permits the requested VM size.
  • 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 tier allowances and credit packs.