Metering

MAP's billing model is three-dimensional. Every call is metered against tokens, seconds, and watts independently. MEAL records the metered events; MANA enforces tenant runway; MADE settles across organizations.

The three dimensions

Tokens

The unit of thought. LLM input + output tokens consumed by reasoning protocols (MARC, MAVEN, MACE, MAGE, MARI, MAGI).

• Token rates vary by protocol — heavy reasoners like MARC charge differently than light verifiers like MAVEN.
• Input and output tokens are counted independently.
• The token meter excludes overhead tokens (system prompts, tooling) — only intent-bearing tokens count.

Seconds

The unit of presence. Wall-clock time held against a deadline.

• Charged for every call. A protocol call that takes 1.4s and uses no tokens is still billed for 1.4 seconds.
• Useful for durable workflows (MOON), physical actions (MOTE), and any operation that holds real time.
• Sub-second resolution. The minimum chargeable unit is 1 millisecond.

Watts

The unit of work in the physical sense. Energy draw on bound compute.

• Charged when the operation runs GPU-bound work — heavy inference, training passes, large matrix ops.
• Measured at the substrate via vendor APIs (NVIDIA NVML on bare-metal; cloud GPU telemetry otherwise).
• Sovereign deployments can substitute their own measurement source.

The rate card

Rate cards are published per protocol and per tier. The current default rates (pricing):

Heavy protocols carry multipliers on these base rates:

Reconciliation

// MEAL operations
"meter"     // record a metered event (tokens + seconds + watts) against caller account
"statement" // generate a statement for an account over a period
"reconcile" // reconcile metered events against settled payments; reports unbalances

The triple-entry book is:

1. Tenant ledger — every metered event debits the tenant's runway
2. Settlement ledger — every successful MADE::economic_contract_settle credits the merchant
3. Audit chain — every meter event records to MAX

MEAL::reconcile runs nightly (or on-demand) and asserts that:

sum(tenant_debits) = sum(merchant_credits) + sum(audit_records)

Any drift produces an Unbalanced event recorded to MAX and routed to ops.

Runway enforcement

MANA::budget is consulted at the meter step (Stage 5 of the pipeline). If the tenant's runway is below threshold, the request is refused at MANA rather than MEAL:

let budget = mana::budget(tenant).await?;
if budget.remaining_in_dimension(Dim::Tokens) < estimated_tokens {
    return Err(CoreError::ProtocolError(ProtocolError::PolicyDenied {
        reason: "tenant runway exhausted (tokens)".into()
    }));
}

MANA can also throttle rather than refuse — reducing the rate-limit bucket for non-essential operations while still allowing critical ones (governance, audit reads).

Emergency holds

Under tenant-charter authority, MANA::hold can declare an emergency hold that stops all non-essential operations. The hold is multi-sig revocable (requires MACE quorum). All in-flight operations complete; new operations refuse.

This is the institution's emergency brake. It is rare but the institution always retains the option.

Pricing tier behavior

See also

• MEAL protocol — the meter
• MANA protocol — the treasury
• MADE protocol — settlement
• Pricing & rate card