Billing

You are billed the clearing price for capacity you hold — never above your declared ceiling, and usually below it (during a minimum-duration protection window the assessed rate can be as high as your ceiling). Billing rides prepaid credits managed on the console's Billing page, where self-serve purchases are available.

Buying credits

Credits are prepaid at $1 = 1 credit, topped up from the Billing page in one of two ways:

• Credit card ($50,000 per 7 days) — self-serve, through a Stripe-hosted checkout (card details never touch the console). Your organization's card payments may total $50,000 inside any rolling 7 days. Every card payment counts, one time top ups and auto reload charges alike. The Billing page shows what a card can still carry right now. The cap frees up as payments older than 7 days age out.
• Wire transfer — for payments above $50,000 and for anything beyond the 7 day card cap. The receiving-bank and beneficiary details and your organization's wire reference are on the console's Billing page under Wire transfer, and on the billing API's summary as wire for an agent. You must include the reference in the wire's memo field — it identifies your organization and ensures your account is credited promptly. Email billing@nationalcompute.com when you send a wire so we can keep an eye out for it.

What the meter measures

For burst capacity the market's own record is the bill: every auction tick records the rate assessed to each winning unit, and charges are accounted at those market-run boundaries — when a node arrives, when its price changes, when it leaves. A base load block is the exception and has its own section below.

• VM clusters — a node bills from grant completion to the start of reclaim. You pay while you hold it, whether or not jobs are running; holding is under your control (max_gpus, release, swap).
• Kubernetes clusters — a node bills while it is a joined member serving your cluster, with a minimum of one hour per granted node: the minimum hold keeps the node yours for its first hour even if its job finishes sooner. After the first hour, charges accrue in minimum increments of five minutes, and because nodes join when jobs need them and shed when idle, billing tracks actual use without any action from you.

Base Load Capacity

A base load block bills its fixed rate for every node in the block across the whole term, idle or busy, delivered or being replaced — that is what the fixed rate buys. Charges land on your credit balance in the same five-minute cadence as burst capacity; each charge names the block it belongs to. The block's nodes never appear in the market's clearing rates, and burst nodes you hold beyond the block bill as ordinary burst capacity. Billing stops at the end of the term, or at the moment a block is cancelled by a billing hold reaching enforcement.

Marshall model usage

Marshall's model calls are metered per member and charged to your organization's credits from the first call, in the same credit unit as capacity, about every five minutes, as one ledger row per organization naming the members and the amount each used. The charge counts toward your monthly spend limit like every other charge.

When your organization's balance reaches zero (or a billing hold is active), Marshall is paused for every member. Adding credits resumes Marshall within a minute. Marshall is never paused while your balance is positive, so the balance can run slightly below zero on the last few calls.

The ledger reads these rows as source inference; the console's Billing page shows them under the Marshall chip and as the "Marshall model usage" series on the usage chart. The billing summary carries the organization's charged model usage as inference.

Public Research leases

A Public Research node bills per GPU-hour, for every GPU in the node, at the flat rate in force when the lease was granted, from the moment the node is yours to the moment the lease ends: released, preempted, lost, ended at zero balance or ended by National Compute alike. The rate is on the Marshall quote and on the Billing page under Rates; a change to it applies to leases granted afterwards and never reprices a running one. Waiting in the queue and the rebuild after a lease cost nothing. A request is admitted only with a balance covering the first hour of a lease; a balance that reaches zero ends a running lease, and a billing hold refuses new requests.

The ledger reads these rows as source public_research; the console's Billing page shows them under the Public Research chip, and the billing summary carries the month's GPU-hours and charged amount as public_research.

What is never billed

• Ticks that clear at $0. An uncontended market can clear at a real $0 rate — those hours cost nothing.
• Gaps in the market record. If the platform's market loop has an outage, the gap is unbilled — the platform's loss, never yours.
• Pending capacity. Declared demand that hasn't been granted costs nothing; you pay only from the moment a node is yours.

Reading your records

Every charge above is a ledger row your organization can read with its API token — per node, per price window, with burst, base load and storage told apart — through the billing records API. The console's Billing page renders the same rows.

Predicting your spend

Read your rate instead of estimating it. GET /api/billing/balance on the billing records API returns your balance with the hourly rate the meter last assessed across your organization, folded by kind, cluster and unit price, so jobs bidding different ceilings show as separate lines, and GET /api/billing/balance/history shows how the balance has moved. The figure is 5 to 10 minutes behind the market. Your worst case is still arithmetic: held GPUs × your declared ceiling. The market feed publishes what capacity really clears at, per tick and as a long-run series, and every capacity read echoes your own declared ceiling.

Invoices

An organization that can pay by card can also issue itself an invoice for prepaid credits and pay it by wire through its accounts payable team. The platform issues, records and serves the document; nobody at National Compute is in the loop. Request one on the portal's billing page, under the wire transfer rail, or ask Marshall for one.

The bill-to block is the organization's billing profile: a name, one to six address lines and an optional email, set once by any member and printed on every invoice issued afterwards. Editing the profile never rewrites an issued document.

The invoice id is the wire memo. Put it in the transfer's reference or memo field. Credits land when the wire does; issuing an invoice moves no credits. Terms are due on receipt.

The billing page lists the organization's invoices with a download for each. An open invoice can be cancelled there (or through Marshall): it stops being payable and no credits move. A paid invoice is never cancelled, and a cancelled invoice is never paid.

Limit	Value
Amount	any positive dollar figure, at most two decimals
Open invoices per organization	10 (currently); pay or cancel one before issuing another
Invoices per organization	1,000 (currently), every status counted
Organizations on a reserved arrangement	refused; finance invoices them under the contract

Issuing refuses with one of these codes; the portal and Marshall name the fix in the same answer.

Code	Status	Meaning
bad-request	422	a field is malformed; field names it
profile-missing	409	set the billing profile first
self-serve-off	409	the organization cannot pay by card (a reserved arrangement, or card purchases off)
open-limit	409	ten invoices are open; open_limit and open_count carry the numbers
invoice-limit	409	the organization holds its maximum; invoice_limit carries the number
not-open	409	a cancel of an invoice that is paid, void or already cancelled; invoice_status says which

With an org API token the invoices are readable, not issuable: there is no issue verb on the token API.

Route	Answers
GET /api/billing/invoices	{profile, invoices, invoice_count, invoice_limit, open_count, open_limit, self_serve}
GET /api/billing/invoices/{id}.pdf	the document, application/pdf

Each invoice carries id, amount_usd, status (issued, paid, void or cancelled), date, due_date, bill_to as printed, wire_memo (the id), cancellable and pdf_path. Another organization's id, an unknown id and a malformed id are the same 404. Organizations without the feature read 404 on both routes.