Choosing a Pricing Scheme

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Use exact when…

• The cost per call is deterministic (a lookup, a fixed record, a canned response).
• The response size is bounded.
• You want buyers to be able to budget precisely.

requirePayment({
  scheme: "exact",
  amount: "5000",  // 0.005 USDC
  asset: "USDC",
  ...
});

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Use upto when…

• Cost depends on input (LLM tokens, transcription minutes, translation characters).
• Response size is unbounded and you charge by volume.
• You cannot predict compute cost until the job runs.

requirePayment({
  scheme: "upto",
  amount: "1000000", // 0.1 USDC ceiling
  asset: "USDC",
  pricing: { unit: "1k_tokens", pricePerUnit: "5000" },
  ...
});

// After work is done:
await facilitator.settle({ actualAmount: "340000" });

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Common mistakes

• Using upto with a huge ceiling for a cheap deterministic call. Buyers set per-call caps; a ceiling of $10 for a$0.001 call makes you unfilterable and hurts rank.
• Using exact for LLM completions and quoting worst-case tokens. Buyers overpay every call and go elsewhere.
• Forgetting to declare pricing. Buyers cannot decide whether your upto ceiling is reasonable without knowing the unit rate.

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Mixed offerings

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Related

• Exact Scheme
• Upto Scheme