What Is Metered

Insulin measures six resources. Each is recorded as it is consumed, priced against the rate in effect for that month, and taken off your credit balance.

The six metered resources

These are the rows you see under Resource in the usage breakdown, with the unit each quantity is counted in.

Tokens

Input and output are counted separately because every provider charges differently for each direction, so each direction needs its own rate.

Cached context is counted in full. A long conversation resends earlier turns on every request, and providers charge for those tokens even when they serve them from cache. They are recorded as input tokens, and today they are priced at the same rate as fresh input.

Reasoning tokens count as output. Models that think before answering bill that thinking at the output rate, and Suger records it the same way.

Failed and cancelled requests are still billed. A generation that fails partway has already been run, and the provider charges Suger for it whether or not the answer reached you. Whatever token count the provider reports for the failed call is what is metered.

Sandboxes

A sandbox bills three things independently, because the sandbox provider bills Suger for three things independently.

• Processor and memory accrue while the sandbox is running. Stopping it ends both.
• Storage accrues for as long as the sandbox exists. Stopping does not release the volume — it is still reserved for you, and Suger is still charged for it. Deleting the sandbox is what stops the charge.

Accrual is measured in windows rather than in one lump at the end, so a sandbox left running for weeks shows up in the usage breakdown as it goes rather than arriving as a surprise.

Object storage

Object storage is not consumed, it is held — so it is measured as a gauge rather than counted. Once a day, Suger records how much your organization is holding, across shared organization storage and each member’s own storage together.

The month is billed on its highest daily reading. Not the average, and not the figure at month end. If you hold 500 GB for a single day and delete it, that month bills 500 GB: the capacity was reserved on the day you used it, and the supplier charged for it then.

From consumption to a number on your bill

The two arrows out of the balance are why the page can look inconsistent for a short while: the Credit balance moves within about a minute of a request, while the usage breakdown is re-aggregated every couple of hours. A balance that has dropped against a table that has not caught up is the normal, expected state — not a missing charge. See Reading your usage.

How prices are set

Suger prices everything; the payment provider only collects. Stripe holds no rate card and performs no pricing — it receives an already-priced invoice. That is what makes the invoiced total equal the metered total.

• Rates are effective-dated and immutable. A price change applies to the month it takes effect in and to later months. It never reaches backwards: re-pricing a closed period reproduces the original amount.
• Rates are refreshed monthly, ahead of the month they apply to, from the supplier’s published prices.
• An automatic price rise is capped. A refreshed rate more than 25% above the previous one is rejected and the previous price is kept, so a misread supplier page cannot reach an invoice. Price cuts are accepted at any size — providers cut sharply and often, and refusing a real cut would keep overcharging you.
• A model with no published rate is still billed, at a documented fallback. The fallback supplier cost is $5.00 per million input tokens and $10.00 per million output tokens; with the margin below applied, the charged rate is $7.50 per million input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens. Newly released models are the usual case, and consumption is never silently dropped for want of a price.

Suger’s price is the supplier’s cost plus a margin: 50% on model calls Suger supplies the key for, and 30% on sandbox and storage. Prices are in US dollars and exclude tax.

Using your own provider keys (BYOK)

If you connect your own model provider key, that provider bills you directly for the tokens, under your own contract. Suger’s charge is then a flat fee per unit rather than a percentage — a percentage of a cost Suger does not incur would be nothing, while the platform still routes, meters and secures every request.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• BYOK usage still appears in your usage breakdown, attributed to the provider whose key was used.
• A zero balance still pauses BYOK requests, because the per-unit fee is still owed. See When AI pauses.

What is never billed

• Suger’s own AI. Platform features that call a model internally — summarization, search indexing, embeddings, reranking, field mapping — are Suger’s cost, not yours. They are metered for operational monitoring and never reach billing.
• Anything outside Insulin. Only consumption in the AI service is billed.
• Reading what you already have. Opening, listing or searching your stored files, and starting, stopping or connecting to an existing sandbox, are never refused for billing reasons and are not separately charged.
• Database storage. Not metered.

How long the detail is kept

After 13 months the breakdown is collapsed rather than deleted: the attribution — which user, which app, which model — is dropped, and a daily total per resource remains. A history that ended abruptly would read as data loss.

The period selector offers the last 12 months, which is inside the window where the full attributed breakdown still exists.