Usage tiers & credits

Pay per-hour from prepaid credits instead of a flat monthly plan — On-Demand and Spot usage tiers for bursty, part-time agents.

Two ways to pay

Every jurniti agent runs in its own Firecracker microVM. You pick how it's billed:

Flat monthly plans — an always-on VM at a fixed price. Cheapest for an agent you keep running 24/7. This is the Quickstart path (jurniti up --plan …).
Usage tiers — a Starter-sized VM (1 vCPU · 2 GiB RAM) metered by the hour and drawn from a prepaid credit balance. Best when the agent only runs part of the day.

Usage tiers exist for bursty, part-time work: run for an afternoon, stop, and pay for exactly the hours you used. There are two of them — On-Demand and Spot — and they differ only in price and whether they can be interrupted.

Still no free tier

Usage tiers are a billing mode, not a free plan. A card must be on file and you top up credits before an agent runs — there's still no free trial and no free tier. What you get is finer-grained billing, not a giveaway.

On-Demand — $0.05/hour

A guaranteed slot: never interrupted while running. Stop it whenever you like and the meter stops with it.

It starts in seconds when warm capacity is available, otherwise it's queued — you'll be emailed when it starts. We don't invent an ETA; if there's no warm box, you wait for one and get a notification the moment it's yours.

Running 24/7? Use a flat plan

Running 24/7 ≈ $36.50/mo — the $25/mo flat plan is cheaper for always-on. On-Demand pays off for part-time agents; once you're running one continuously, switch to a flat plan.

Spot — $0.025/hour

Half the On-Demand rate, in exchange for interruptibility. The trade is disclosed up front, not buried:

Spot can be interrupted

AWS reclaims can lose up to the last ~10 minutes of unsynced work; jurniti-initiated pauses lose nothing.

When capacity gets tight, a Spot agent pauses gracefully and restores automatically once capacity frees. That makes it a fit for interruption-tolerant work — batch runs, experiments, and agents that checkpoint their own progress. If losing a few minutes of unsynced work would hurt, use On-Demand instead.

Prepaid credits

Usage tiers draw from a credit balance you top up in advance:

$10 minimum top-up. Your card stays on file and is never charged until you explicitly top up.
Billed per second while running, with a 60-second minimum per run. A stopped agent burns nothing.
A $0 balance gracefully stops your usage VMs — persist is preserved, nothing is deleted. That is the spending cap: hit zero, and you simply top up and start again when you're ready.

Refunds

Unused credit is refundable anytime. Consumed credit — hours an agent has already run — is final.

How to use it

From the CLI:

jurniti credits buy 25          # buy $25 of prepaid credits ($10 minimum)
jurniti credits balance         # balance, burn rate, and runway
jurniti credits history         # the credit ledger
jurniti credits refund 10       # refund unused credit

jurniti up --tier ondemand --harness hermes   # a guaranteed usage VM
jurniti up --tier spot --harness hermes        # a cheaper, interruptible one

--tier and --plan are mutually exclusive: a tier meters hourly from credits, so there's no billing cycle and --cycle doesn't apply. You can also buy credits and launch a usage VM from the dashboard.

Your agent can manage credits too

The CLI is also an MCP server, so an agent can run these itself — the credits_balance, credits_buy, credits_history, and credits_refund tools mirror the verbs above. See MCP.

When to pick which

Always-on agent → a flat plan (cheapest for 24/7).
A few hours a day / bursty → On-Demand ($0.05/hr, never interrupted).
Interruption-tolerant batch work → Spot ($0.025/hr, checkpoints its own progress).