Billing & Payments
Understand how Beam credits and plans are paid for by card, by USDC, and by 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 transfers run. This page describes how a payment becomes credits.
Which settlement rail a payment takes is decided entirely by the currency:
| Currency | Rail | Settles through | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| USD | Card | Stripe, embedded in the console | Available |
| TAO | On-chain deposit address | Beam's own chain watcher | Available |
| Alpha Beam | On-chain deposit address | Beam's own chain watcher | Available |
| USDC | Hosted crypto checkout | Coinbase Commerce (Ethereum, Base, Polygon) | Not currently offered |
No payment processor settles Beam subnet alpha, which exists only on the Bittensor chain. That is why the two Bittensor assets are settled by Beam directly rather than by a provider.
A method is never selectable before its rail can actually settle, so no one picks a payment that would fail at checkout.
Every rail, one ledger
Whichever rail a payment takes, it converges on the same idempotent credit grant. Credits are written only once settlement is confirmed.
The uniqueness constraint on the credit ledger is what makes every path safe to retry. A webhook delivered twice, a block scanned twice, or a page reloaded twice all produce exactly one credit grant.
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 when Stripe confirms the payment, via the same webhook and idempotent ledger write every other rail uses.
Paying with USDC
Coinbase Commerce hosts the checkout, quotes the exchange rate, and guarantees it for the life of the charge. Beam names a price in US dollars and never computes an exchange rate itself.
If a payment goes wrong. An underpaid charge is never credited automatically — it is held for review, and resolving it grants the originally purchased pack. An overpaid charge is credited for what was purchased, with the surplus recorded so support can refund it. A charge that expires unpaid is closed, but is revived if funds arrive later.
If a webhook is missed. The console reconciles on its own: it re-checks any pending payment when you return from checkout, polls while a payment is in flight, and sweeps stale payments whenever the billing page loads. Coinbase also retries delivery for up to three days.
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 holds no private key for these addresses on any server. Each address is derived from a master public key, so the console can create addresses but cannot spend from them. The matching spending key is derived offline by an operator, which is also how deposited funds are later moved.
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 always round down. Any remainder stays as value received but ungranted, and a deposit worth less than a single credit is recorded but grants nothing until topped up. 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.
Every deposit is recorded once, keyed by its exact position on chain, so a re-scan can never grant credits twice.
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
Because no spending key is held on a server, Beam cannot issue an automatic on-chain refund. Contact support; refunds are performed manually by an operator.
Plans
Plan subscriptions are card-only. Crypto buys credits, which are consumed as transfers run.
Credit consumption
Credits are consumed as transfers run, and every grant and deduction is recorded in the organization's credit ledger, visible under Billing → Payment history.
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.