Payments

Pay for exactly the time you use

A stream moves money continuously while a service is being used and stops the instant you say so.

Instead of prepaying a month or settling a bill after the fact, a payment stream pays a provider as the seconds pass or the meter ticks. Either side can settle at any time, and the payer can pause or close the stream whenever they want.

Start building See the compute market

Renting a GPU, a seat, a data feed or an agent's attention is a time problem disguised as a billing problem. You want to pay for the hours you use, the provider wants to be paid as those hours pass, and neither of you wants the other holding a month of money. A payment stream does exactly that. Funds flow from payer to provider by the second, or by metered units, for as long as the stream is open.

Why hourly rentals finally work

Say you rent compute at $1.80 an hour. You open a stream with $50 of funding and that rate. Forty seconds in, the provider has earned two cents. After six hours, $10.80 has moved and the remaining $39.20 is still yours. Stop the stream and the unspent balance returns immediately. The provider can settle what it has earned whenever it likes, so there is no end-of-month exposure on either side.

1 second

the smallest unit you pay for

owed after you stop a stream

Any time

either side can settle what is due

Two ways to meter

By time. The rate is per second. Ideal for compute, seats, support retainers and anything where availability is the product.
By usage. The provider reports units consumed, such as tokens or requests, and the stream pays for them at the agreed rate. Ideal for inference and data.
Top up without stopping. Add funds to a running stream and it keeps flowing.
Change the rate. Agree a new price and the stream settles everything earned at the old rate first, then continues at the new one.
Pause and resume. Step away for a weekend and nothing is charged until you come back.

The provider is paid for every second they serve. The customer is never out more than the seconds served.

Streams and budgets together

A stream can be funded from a budget, so a person can let an agent rent compute by the hour while a monthly ceiling still applies. The agent decides when to start and stop. The budget decides how much it may ever spend. You see both on one ledger, with a receipt for every settlement.

A tip for providers

Settle on a schedule that suits your cash flow, hourly or daily, and let the stream do the rest. Your customers see the same running balance you do.