# 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.

Part of the jurniti developer docs — canonical page: https://www.jurniti.com/docs/usage-tiers · full docs index: https://www.jurniti.com/docs/llms.txt

## 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](/docs/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:

```bash
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](/docs/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).