AI credits
Twelve modalities, each with its own unit of account
The mistake most compute contracts make is pricing everything in GPU-hours when the buyer thinks in pages, minutes or agent-hours. Each modality below bills in the unit its buyer already plans in, and settles in dollars underneath.
Text & reasoning
per 1M tokensChat, extraction, summarisation, classification, long-horizon reasoning.
- Cost driver
- Context length and output length. Reasoning models bill thinking tokens as output.
- Who buys it
- Every software company. The default first workload.
Code
per 1M tokensCompletion, review, migration, agentic repair against a repository.
- Cost driver
- Repo context dominates. Caching the tree is the single biggest lever on unit cost.
- Who buys it
- Engineering orgs, dev-tool vendors.
Image
per imageGeneration, editing, upscaling, background and product composition.
- Cost driver
- Resolution and step count, not prompt length.
- Who buys it
- Commerce, marketing, gaming, design tools.
Video
per second of outputText-to-video, image-to-video, interpolation, restoration.
- Cost driver
- Seconds × resolution × frame rate. The most compute-hungry unit on this page.
- Who buys it
- Studios, advertising, social platforms.
Speech
per audio minuteTranscription, diarisation, translation, synthesis, voice conversion.
- Cost driver
- Audio duration. Realtime bidirectional costs more than batch by a wide margin.
- Who buys it
- Contact centres, media, accessibility, healthcare scribing.
Search & retrieval
per 1K queriesEmbeddings, vector and hybrid retrieval, reranking, grounded answers.
- Cost driver
- Index size and recall target. Reranking is usually the expensive half.
- Who buys it
- Anyone with a corpus. The quiet workhorse of enterprise AI.
Documents & OCR
per pageLayout parsing, table extraction, handwriting, signature and stamp detection.
- Cost driver
- Page count and whether structure must be preserved for downstream systems.
- Who buys it
- Banks, insurers, logistics, public sector, legal.
Tabular & forecasting
per 1M rows scoredScoring, imputation, anomaly detection, demand and risk forecasting.
- Cost driver
- Row count and feature width. Cheap per unit, enormous in volume.
- Who buys it
- Retail, energy, insurance, credit, supply chain.
Realtime vision
per stream-hourContinuous inference on live camera and sensor feeds at the edge or in region.
- Cost driver
- Streams × frame rate × model size. Latency budget sets the floor on where it runs.
- Who buys it
- Manufacturing, logistics, physical security, transport, agriculture.
Agents
per agent-hourLong-running tool use, planning, and multi-step execution against real systems.
- Cost driver
- Wall-clock time and tool calls, not a single prompt. Costs behave like a job, not a request.
- Who buys it
- Operations, finance, support, engineering. The fastest-growing line.
3D & simulation
per asset / sim-hourMesh and scene generation, physics simulation, synthetic data for robotics.
- Cost driver
- Asset fidelity and simulation wall-clock.
- Who buys it
- Robotics, industrial digital twins, games, AV programmes.
World models
per rollout-hourLearned environment models for planning, policy training and evaluation.
- Cost driver
- Rollout horizon and parallel environments. Frontier-priced and frontier-scarce.
- Who buys it
- Robotics and AV labs, a small number of frontier research groups.