Documentation

Prepaid credits

RunLayer bills metered agent usage from a workspace prepaid balance denominated in settlement-token wei (18 decimals). No card rails — fund on-chain or use workspace grants on testnet.

How credits work

Balance lives in prepaid_balances per workspace (off-chain ledger mirrored in the console).
After a metered run completes, the orchestrator debits prompt_tokens × rate + completion_tokens × rate (configurable per environment).
Free agents (Quick ask) complete with cost_wei: 0 and skip balance checks.
Custom agents are always metered.

Check balance

API

GET https://runlayer-y9kc.onrender.com/v1/billing/balance
Authorization: Bearer <token-or-key>

→ { "balance_wei": "1000000000000000000000", "unit": "wei" }

The console shows formatted credits in the top bar, playground, and Usage page.

Funding options

Method	When	Notes
Onboarding grant	New workspace	Initial test credits from orchestrator config
Credit vault deposit	Testnet / mainnet	ERC20 approve + deposit; indexer credits wallet owner workspace
Dev top-up	Local orchestrator	POST /v1/billing/topup with dev secret (Usage page button)

Insufficient balance

Metered runs return 402 insufficient_prepaid_credits when balance is zero before execution, or when the post-run debit would overdraw.

Settlement token — beyond prepaid

The same ERC20 used for vault deposits is the platform settlement unit. Primary use today is prepaid compute credits. The token also anchors:

Vault accounting — on-chain deposit/withdraw balances per wallet before orchestrator indexing.
Network incentives — operator payouts and SLA bonds settled in the same asset as node registration.
Workspace limits — optional spend caps and API key budgets denominated in credits.
Integrator resale — ISVs prepay bulk credits and meter downstream customers using receipt ids.

On-chain vs off-chain

Deposits are on-chain; per-run debits are off-chain for latency and receipt granularity. Withdraw unused vault balance on-chain; run history reconciles via credit_ledger and cost_wei on each run.

See Smart contracts for vault interfaces and deployment order.