How billing works

Else is prepaid and metered. You put money in a Wallet, and each piece of work draws from it at a published price. There is no subscription, no monthly plan, no per-seat charge, and no credits or tokens to buy and interpret. Your balance is ordinary money in US dollars, and it never expires.

Nothing is charged for having an account, opening the app, or leaving a run paused and waiting for you. Money moves when work actually runs.

The five things that can cost money

Everything on a bill is one of these. Each is metered by real use, not by a flat per-run fee:

What it is	How it’s metered	Where the rate is
Thinking and writing — the model reading your request and producing an answer	Per million tokens, priced separately for input and output	Model prices
Generating an image	Per image, by size	Model prices
Reading a web page	Per page rendered	Model prices
Running code in the secure workspace	Per minute of run time	Model prices
Transcribing audio you send	Per minute of audio	On the receipt

The first one dominates almost every bill. Tokens are how models measure text — roughly 4 characters, or about ¾ of a word. Output tokens cost more than input tokens on nearly every model, which is why a long answer costs more than a long question.

The last three are metered per unit of real use. Two of them carry a published rate on Model prices; audio transcription is charged at the metered rate we are charged for it with nothing added, so its amount appears on the receipt rather than as a rate here. Either way the charge is itemized when it happens, which is the number that actually matters — see Reading a receipt.

Price depends on which model ran

There is no single “price per task”, and we are not going to invent one. What a run costs depends on which model did the work, and models differ by more than a hundredfold from cheapest to most expensive.

You pick that through the engine menu in the composer, which offers four options:

• Auto — picks for each request
• Fast — cheapest acceptable answer
• Smart — balanced quality, long context
• Max — deepest reasoning

Each of the three named tiers runs one model by default, and Model prices lists which model that is together with its per-million-token price. You can also point a tier at a different model in Settings → How it works → Set an engine per speed tier, or pick a model for a single request from Pick an exact engine. Whatever you pick is recorded on the receipt.

Because the tiers are named for what they are for rather than what they cost, a tier name on its own is never a price. Always read the two together.

One more thing that can appear

A very long chat eventually exceeds what a model can hold at once. When that happens Else summarises the earlier part of the chat so the work can continue — and that summarising step is itself a model call, so it is metered like any other. It is unusual, it only affects long-running chats, and it shows up on the receipt like everything else. We mention it because it is the one charge you would not otherwise predict.

What you are charged when things go wrong

Briefly, because it deserves its own page: you are charged for work that actually ran, including when the run failed and produced nothing useful, and there is no refund. If a run consumed nothing at all, there is no charge and no receipt. See When a run fails for the full picture.

Your spend limit is not a price

The number you set on a run, and the Wallet’s top-up amounts, are budgets you choose rather than prices. A given limit buys very different amounts of work depending on which model runs.

What that number does depends on where you set it. On a chat it is not applied today — it is recorded and shown back to you, and nothing acts on it; what stops a chat is a fixed per-turn ceiling you cannot see or change. On work you hand off the limit you set is genuinely read, but only between steps and only against money already spent. Spending limits is the page on that, and it does not soften it.

Where to look next

• Model prices — the per-model rate for every model you can pick, and what each tier runs
• Reading a receipt — every field on a receipt, and what it means
• Topping up — how to add money, and what happens the first time
• Spending limits — what the limit does, and what it does not
• Glossary — what run, turn, step, receipt and Wallet mean exactly; this page uses all five