Billing & Payments
What Beam actions cost, and how Beam credits are paid for by card, TAO, or Beam subnet alpha.
Beam usage is denominated in credits. Credits are bought in packs, or included in a plan, and are consumed as billable actions run, from the API, the SDKs, the CLI, Studio or MCP alike. This page covers what things cost and how a payment becomes credits.
Prices
| What | Price |
|---|---|
| Transfer | 0.2 credit per transfer, plus 0.02 credit per GB delivered ($0.10 per transfer plus $0.01 per GB, $10 per TB), rounded up per transfer to the next 0.01 credit. |
| Room transfer | 0.2 credit per transfer, plus 0.02 credit per GB delivered, rounded up per transfer to the next 0.01 credit. The file counts once for each Room member that receives all of it. |
| Studio workflow run | Free, its steps included. The transfers and Room transfers a run starts are charged as transfers. |
| Room start | 1 credit each time a Room is started |
| Room streams and messages | Free |
A credit costs $0.50. GB and TB are decimal: 1 GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes and 1 TB is 1,000 GB. A transfer is priced at 0.2 credit plus its exact size, then rounded up to the next hundredth of a credit, so a transfer that moves any data costs at least 0.21 credit ($0.105). For example:
| Transfer size | Credits | USD |
|---|---|---|
| 1 byte | 0.21 | $0.105 |
| 1 GB | 0.22 | $0.11 |
| 1 GiB (1,073,741,824 bytes) | 0.23 | $0.115 |
| 20 GB | 0.6 | $0.30 |
| 100 GB | 2.2 | $1.10 |
| 1 TB | 20.2 | $10.10 |
| 100 TB | 2,000.2 | $1,000.10 |
Credits never go beyond two decimal places: balances, charges and usage are all shown to the hundredth of a credit.
A transfer is charged at the price in effect when it ends. Existing reservations and settled charges retain their original amounts. Telemetry API and AI usage are priced separately.
Before a transfer starts, Beam estimates its cost. If the estimate is more than your API key may spend, the transfer is refused before any data moves: the request fails with HTTP 402 and the code insufficient_credits, with the credits required and the credits available. What a key may spend is your plan's included credits left this period plus your organization's balance, within the key's own credit limit and monthly budget. Add credits, or turn on auto top-up, and start it again. A Room transfer is estimated for the file size once for each Room member it is sent to, and is refused the same way.
A transfer that was already running when your credits ran out, for example because other transfers or workflow runs spent them first, is still charged when it completes, so your balance can go below zero. New transfers are refused until you add credits.
Credit packs
Card payments in the Console buy credits in packs:
| Pack | Credits |
|---|---|
| $10 | 20 |
| $25 | 50 |
| $50 | 100 |
| $100 | 200 |
Auto top-up buys one of these packs. TAO and Alpha Beam deposits are not packs: they are credited at the value received, as described below.
Ways to pay
How you pay depends on the currency:
| Currency | How you pay | Status |
|---|---|---|
| USD | Card, in the Console (Stripe) | Available |
| TAO | Your organization's own deposit address | Available |
| Alpha Beam | Your organization's own deposit address | Available |
| USDC | — | Not currently offered |
Beam subnet alpha exists only on the Bittensor chain, so Beam settles TAO and Alpha Beam deposits itself, from finalized blocks, rather than through a payment provider.
A method is never selectable before it can actually settle, so no one picks a payment that would fail at checkout.
Every payment is credited once
Whichever way you pay, credits are granted only once the payment has settled, and each payment is credited exactly once. A notification delivered twice, a block read twice, or a page reloaded twice never grants credits twice.
Referral rewards
Every account has a referral link, on Settings → Referrals. Share it, and anyone who creates their account through it is recorded as your referral.
When a referral's organization has purchased $500 of credits in total, that referral qualifies and earns you +10% bonus credits on your next credit purchase. The purchase is charged in full; the bonus arrives as extra credits beside it.
- Qualifying spend is counted across every payment method from the point the referred account joined its organization, net of refunds. There is no deadline.
- Each referral earns one reward. Rewards queue up, and exactly one is applied per purchase, so a purchase is never discounted twice.
- Rewards do not expire, and they apply to automatic top-ups as well as purchases you make yourself.
- The bonus appears in payment history as its own line, so you can always see what was granted and which referral paid it.
- Your code never changes, so a link you have already shared keeps working.
Your referrals page shows whether each referral has qualified, and nothing else about them. It does not report their spending, their name or their email — how much another organization buys is their business, not the referrer's.
Paying by card
Stripe's payment form is mounted directly in the billing page — paying does not send you to another site. Card details are entered in Stripe-hosted fields and never reach Beam's servers.
Credits are granted as soon as Stripe confirms the payment.
Paying with TAO or Alpha Beam
Bittensor assets settle directly on chain. Every organization gets its own deposit address, generated the first time you open the crypto tab in Billing. Funds are never pooled with another customer's.
Because the address identifies you, there is nothing else to get right: no memo, no exact amount to match, and no time limit. Send whatever you like, whenever you like.
Beam's servers hold no key that can spend from these addresses: the Console can create your deposit address, but cannot move funds out of it.
How a deposit is priced
Credits are granted at the value received, using the rate observed when the deposit confirmed — not a rate quoted earlier, because a deposit address has no checkout to quote at.
- TAO is valued against its USD price.
- Alpha Beam is valued through the subnet's own AMM reserves, then to USD. The subnet is its own price oracle; no third-party feed is involved for alpha.
Credits are granted to the hundredth of a credit and always round down, so you are never credited more than you paid: $10.07 buys 20.14 credits, and the remaining fraction of a hundredth (under $0.005) stays as value received but ungranted. Each deposit is credited on its own; one worth less than 0.01 credit is recorded but grants nothing. The rate shown in the console is explicitly indicative and may differ from the one applied.
If the price feed is unavailable, a deposit is held rather than credited at a guessed or stale rate.
What "confirmed" means
Bittensor uses GRANDPA finality, which is absolute — a finalized block cannot be reorganised. Beam scans only finalized blocks and treats finality itself as the confirmation. There is no confirmation counter to wait through; detection typically takes under a minute.
Each deposit is credited once.
Sending alpha
Alpha moves as a stake transfer between coldkeys on the same subnet, which is what btcli stake transfer performs. It arrives as stake owned by your organization's deposit coldkey while remaining delegated to the hotkey you were using.
A transfer between different subnets is not accepted as a deposit: its amount is denominated in another subnet's alpha and cannot be priced against ours.
Refunds
On-chain deposits are not refunded automatically. Contact support to request a refund.
Plans
Plan subscriptions are card-only. Crypto buys credits, which are consumed as transfers run.
Credit consumption
Credits are consumed as billable actions are charged (see Prices), and every grant and deduction is recorded in the organization's credit ledger. A plan's included credits are used before purchased credits.
Auto top-up is card-only. It works by charging a saved payment method when the balance falls below a threshold, which requires a mandate that no crypto rail can provide. Once a card is saved, the threshold and pack can also be set over HTTP — see the Account Management API.
Payment history
Billing → Payment history is the record of what an organization has paid, over any month or year rather than a rolling window of recent days.
It merges three things into one date-ordered list:
- Credit purchases and on-chain deposits, from the credit ledger.
- Refunds, bonuses and manual adjustments.
- Plan and subscription invoices, read directly from Stripe. These never enter the credit ledger, so without them the totals would understate what a paid plan has cost.
Each settled payment expands to its receipt: the amount, the method, who initiated it, and either the Stripe-hosted receipt or the Subscan link for the extrinsic that paid it. A deposit worth less than one credit is listed as needs attention, with the reason it granted nothing — it is recorded, so it is shown.
Plan charges are the one part that depends on a live Stripe call. If Stripe cannot be reached, the page says so and still reports credit purchases and deposits rather than failing.
Exports
Two formats, both scoped to the selected period:
- Export CSV — one row per payment, for reconciliation.
- Statement — a one-page summary with per-method subtotals and line items, laid out for printing or saving as a PDF.
Payment history and usage are also readable over HTTP. See the Account Management API.
Usage breakdowns
Usage answers where credits went, for the same kind of period. Spend is broken down three ways:
- By project — attributed to the project the API key belonged to when it spent.
- By API key
- By action — the billable action the credits were spent on, such as
transfer,room.transfer,workflow.runorroom.start.
Each of these is a snapshot taken when the credits were spent, not a live lookup. Moving a key to another project, or deleting a project, does not rewrite what earlier periods reported. Usage recorded before project attribution existed is attributed to each key's current project, which the page states.
A member whose access is scoped to particular projects sees only those projects' spend.
The same breakdowns are available programmatically at GET /v1/usage, for pulling spend into your own reporting. See the Account Management API.