---
title: Reading a receipt
description: Every run that costs money produces an itemized receipt. Here is each field, what it means, and where to find it.
---

Every run that costs money produces a **Receipt**, and the receipt is the record — not
the limit you set, not an estimate made beforehand. It shows what was charged, how long
the work took, and which engine choice you submitted.

A run that consumed nothing produces **no receipt at all**, rather than a receipt
reading `$0.00`. If there is no receipt, there was no charge.

## Where receipts appear

**Under each reply in a chat.** A small chip sits beneath the answer showing three
things: the amount charged, how long the turn took, and your engine choice. A real one
reads:

```
$0.502 · 1m 46s · Auto
```

Hover it and it expands to the detail — the token counts, and a line per billed attempt
naming the model that produced it.

**On a handed-off task's result page.** A card headed **RECEIPT** shows the total for
the task, the spend limit and how much of it has gone, and the line items that make up
the total, with a running **TOTAL SO FAR**.

Those are the two places. The Wallet shows your **balance**, not a per-run breakdown —
for what an individual run cost, go to that run's receipt.

## Every field, and what it means

| Field | What it means |
| --- | --- |
| **Amount charged** | The authoritative figure — what actually came out of your balance for this turn. Everything else on the receipt explains it; nothing else overrides it. |
| **Tokens** | The total text measured for this turn, input and output together. |
| **Input tokens** | Your request, plus any material and earlier chat the model had to read. This is usually the larger number and the cheaper one. |
| **Output tokens** | What the model wrote back. Priced higher than input on nearly every model. |
| **Duration** | Wall-clock time from the start of the turn to its completion. It is shown for context; you are **not** billed by the second for thinking time. |
| **Model** | Which model produced the reply. On the chip this appears in the expanded detail rather than the visible line. |
| **Your engine choice** | What *you* submitted — `Auto`, a tier, or an exact model — captured before anything was decided. This is your instruction, not the outcome, which is why it can differ from **Model**. |
| **Time** | When the turn completed. |
| **Why it stopped** | Present only when a turn was cut short: because it reached its spend limit, its time limit, or a length limit. Absent on a turn that simply finished. |
| **Attempts** | One line per billed attempt, in the order they were billed, each with its own model and price. More than one line means an attempt was retried — see below. |

### Why there can be more than one attempt

If an attempt is paid for upstream, it appears as its own line, even if it did not
produce the final answer. So a turn that needed a retry shows two lines, and the total
is the sum. This is the honest version: itemizing a paid attempt you did not benefit
from is better than hiding it inside a single rounded number.

### Reading the task card's spend limit line

On a task's result page the receipt sits next to a line like `Spend limit $1.37 — 88%
used`. That figure is the **budget you set**, not a price and not a quote. What the same
budget buys depends entirely on which model runs — see [Model prices](/docs/model-prices).

And note what the percentage does *not* promise: the limit is checked between steps and
compares money already spent, so a run can pass 100% before it pauses.
[Spending limits](/docs/spending-limits) explains exactly how far that can go.

## Two limits of the current receipt, stated plainly

**The task card shows one aggregate line, not a per-model breakdown.** When a task ran
many steps across more than one model, the card gives you the total and the status
rather than a row per model. The per-attempt detail in a chat's receipt chip is finer
grained than the task card's.

**The amount on a task card is not shown next to the model tier that produced it.** You
have to look at the run itself to see which engine choice was in force. We would rather
name that gap than let you assume the number carries a tier with it.

## What the receipt is for

Read the receipt rather than reasoning backwards from your balance. It is the only place
that ties an amount to a specific piece of work, a specific model, and a specific
moment — which is what makes a charge checkable rather than something you have to accept.

## Where to look next

- [How billing works](/docs/how-billing-works) — the five things that can cost money
- [Model prices](/docs/model-prices) — the rate behind every amount you see
- [When a run fails](/docs/when-a-run-fails) — what you are charged when nothing useful came back