Pricing

Cloven ships two billing paths in parallel: prepaid credit packs for human developers with API keys, and per-call USDC payments for autonomous agents (x402). They are independent — you can have an active credit balance and also run a separate agent paying via x402 from its own wallet.

Free tier

Every Cloven account includes a permanent free tier: 100 calls per day on the crypto pack, no credit pack required. Calls that error before reaching the pack pipeline (auth failures, malformed params, 404 on unknown packs) do not count against the daily limit.

Credit packs

Credit packs are one-time USDC purchases on Base. Credits land in your api_keys.credit_balance after on-chain verification. Each API call debits 1 credit from the balance. There are no monthly renewals, no cancellation flows, and no subscriptions.

Larger packs have a lower effective per-call rate — bulk discount applied at purchase, not retroactively. Purchase a pack from /console/credits. Payment is verified on-chain; credits appear within 60 seconds of confirmation.

How deposit verification works

1. Open /console/credits, select a pack, click "Buy".
2. A deposit intent is created: you receive the exact USDC amount, the Cloven treasury address on Base, and a QR code.
3. Send USDC to the address from any Base-compatible wallet. Do not modify the amount.
4. Paste your tx hash into the modal or wait — the verify cron runs every 60 seconds. Credits land automatically when the on-chain Transfer event is confirmed.
5. Deposits expire after 30 minutes if no matching transfer is found. No charge applies to expired deposits.

Credits balance is visible on the Overview and Credits pages in the console. Every active non-revoked key contributes to a shared pool.

x402 — per-call USDC on Base

Autonomous agents can pay per call without provisioning an API key. The price table below is locked v1 — re-quote is required for any future increase, and every quote includes a validUntil timestamp so the agent cannot be sniped mid-flight.

Prices settle in USDC on Base (contract 0x833589fCD6eDb6E08f4c7C32D4f71b54bdA02913). Any underpayment fails closed — Cloven does not partially credit.

Full wire format: x402 payments. Verification rules: x402 verification.

When to use which

Use credit packs when:

• You are building a backend service or dashboard that makes predictable API calls.
• You want cost visibility without per-transaction gas overhead.
• You prefer buying in bulk and not thinking about payment per call.

Example: a research agent that fetches cloven.fresh on a schedule, run by a human who logs into the console to top up credits.

Use x402 when:

• You have an autonomous agent with a wallet (Coinbase AgentKit, ClawBank, a bare EOA).
• No human is in the loop to provision a key or top up a balance.
• Your agent reads its own ETH balance, signs its own USDC transfer, and pays its own bill.

Example: an LLM loop running in a cloud function that needs fresh context on demand and can authorize on-chain payments from its embedded wallet.

$CLOVEN stake discounts (Phase 3)

Stake-tier discounts are scaffolded in the codebase today and dormant until the $CLOVEN token launches in Phase 3. The discount table is informational only — lib/billing/discounts.ts currently returns 0% for every wallet.

Discounts apply at quote time. The wallet paying via x402 is the same wallet whose $CLOVEN stake determines its tier. Discount math happens at quote time, not retroactively.

Revenue routing

All revenue (credit packs + x402) is split:

• 50% — $CLOVEN buyback-and-burn (Phase 3 onwards; Phase 1 accumulates in a public reserve).
• 40% — infrastructure (Groq tokens, Vercel, Supabase, Upstash, RPC providers).
• 10% — team.

Receipts and invoices

Credit pack purchases are USDC transactions on Base — the chain explorer is your receipt. Cloven does not issue per-deposit email receipts. x402 per-call payments are equally on-chain. Contact ops@cloven.cloud for enterprise invoicing.