---
title: How credit pricing works in Tanso
description: The six-step walkthrough from the actions you sell to an agent buying more. Weight table, price book, wallet, margin ledger, agent-serve.
date: 2026-08-07
---

# How credit pricing works in Tanso

Tanso makes your product usable by agents. That takes pricing an agent can
read, plan against, and pay for, and machinery that makes it safe to turn
on. Every number below is editable in the console without a deploy.

## 1. Pick the actions you sell

Meter what customers recognize, like a chat message, a research run, or a
render minute. Features are the spine. Credit weights, entitlement checks,
and cost rules all key off the feature, and optionally the model it ran on.

## 2. Give each action a credit weight

A versioned weight table: 1 chat message = 1 credit, 1 deep-research run =
5, the same run on a costlier model can carry its own weight. Changes are
effective-dated and append-only. History is kept, and past usage is never
repriced.

## 3. Price the credit in dollars

The price book is the second lever, an effective-dated price per credit.
Grants stamp the book price in force when purchased; negotiated per-customer
overrides win. Move either lever without touching the other.

## 4. Sell credits in packs and plans

A prepaid wallet holds pools of grants with expiry and rollover, drawn down
oldest first, every movement in an append-only ledger. Each ingested usage
event returns creditsDeducted, weightApplied, and remainingBalance. An empty
pool denies the action before you incur the cost of serving it.

## 5. Watch cost vs revenue per customer

Attach a cost rule to a feature (per unit, per token, per model) and every
metered event carries its cost next to what you billed. Margin per customer,
feature, and model comes from the same ledger that bills.

## 6. Let agents read, buy, and top up on their own

The pricing above is published as pricing.json, readable without an account.
One-call signup returns a customer-scoped key. No card on file returns 402
with a pollable checkoutSessionId. Spend caps are checked before money
moves, and MCP spend tools require explicit confirmation.

## Forecasting

The usage API projects per-feature usage and credit depletion dates. The
same forecast ships as MIT npm packages (@tansohq/credit-forecast-core,
@tansohq/credit-burndown-react) that work with or without Tanso.

## Links

- Interactive version: https://tansohq.com/how-pricing-works
- Docs: https://tanso.mintlify.app
- Source: https://github.com/tansohq/tanso-oss
- Machine-readable pricing for Tanso itself: https://tansohq.com/pricing.json

More for agents: https://tansohq.com/llms.txt