Two ways to pay for AI, one honest one
Almost every AI product on the market asks you for a monthly subscription. Twenty dollars a month, two hundred dollars a month, pick a tier and hope you guessed your usage right. It is a familiar model because it is a comfortable model — for the seller. Predictable recurring revenue, and every month a customer under-uses their plan, the difference is pure margin. We went the other way. AtmosphereAGI runs on prepaid credits: you buy a balance, your tasks draw it down at Anthropic's sticker rate, and the balance never expires. This post explains why we think that is the right shape for agent work, and where a subscription would honestly serve you better.
The subscription mismatch
Subscriptions fit products you use at a steady rhythm. A music library, an email client, a design tool you open every working day — consumption is roughly flat, so a flat price is fair. Agent work is not like that. One week you delegate a heavy research project and a deck; the next two weeks you delegate nothing. Usage is spiky by nature, because tasks are spiky by nature. A monthly plan forces you to size your payment to your busiest week, then quietly donates the quiet weeks back to the vendor.
There is a second, subtler cost. Subscriptions with usage caps create anxiety at both ends: near the cap you ration yourself, and far under the cap you feel you are wasting money. Neither feeling has anything to do with whether the task in front of you is worth doing. Prepaid credits remove that noise. The only question left is the honest one: is this task worth what it costs to run?
How our credits work
You start with a $25 starter pack, and you can top up in $25, $50, or $100 increments. Every dollar you put in is a dollar of balance — 1:1, no bonus-credit games, no conversion into an in-house currency with a hidden exchange rate. Credits never expire. If you buy $50 today and come back in six months, your $50 is still there.
Tasks draw the balance down at pass-through Anthropic pricing. Sonnet 4.6 input is $3 per million tokens and output is $15 per million, and that is exactly what a task costs you — the same rate Anthropic would charge you directly, line-itemed per step. We do not mark up inference; our margin lives in our own infrastructure, not in your invoice. So a typical medium task lands well under a dollar, and you can see precisely why.
Why "never expires" matters more than it sounds
Expiring credits are a subscription wearing a costume. If your balance evaporates at the end of the month, the vendor has re-created the exact use-it-or-lose-it pressure that made subscriptions a bad fit in the first place. Non-expiring credits change your relationship with the product: you can load a balance once and treat the platform like a utility that is simply there when a task shows up. No monthly decision, no cancellation ritual, no "pause my plan" support ticket. The commitment is a task, not a calendar.
When a subscription genuinely wins
Fairness cuts both ways, so here is the honest counter-case. If your usage really is high and flat — you run heavy agent workloads every single day — a generous flat plan elsewhere can beat pay-per-use, because you are the customer subscriptions under-charge rather than over-charge. And some people simply prefer a fixed number on their card statement, budget-certainty over cost-accuracy. That is a legitimate preference. Our bet is just that most people delegating tasks to agents are spiky users, and spiky users lose money on flat plans almost by definition.
Prepaid keeps us honest, too
The incentive structure is the part we care about most. A subscription vendor profits when you use the product less. A prepaid, pass-through vendor only earns when you actually run tasks — which means our incentive is to make each task cheap, fast, and good enough that you come back with another one. That is also why every run shows its cost as it happens: the Manus-style task card gives you a live view of the work, and the files it produces are yours to download at the end. You paid for a deliverable, you get a deliverable, and you saw the meter the whole time.
The short version
Subscriptions price your calendar; credits price your work. Agent usage is spiky, so pricing the work is fairer. Start with the $25 pack, top up in $25, $50, or $100 chunks when you need to, and let the unspent balance sit as long as you like — it is not going anywhere. And if you would rather pay Anthropic directly, bring your own key: it is stored AES-256-GCM encrypted, only the last four characters are ever shown, and deleting it is immediate. Either way, the number on the invoice is the number the work cost.