Billing, Pricing & Seats

TL;DR

• Orkestia bills the organization. One subscription per organization covers the whole platform. The price follows who operates it: people and agents with identities of their own.
• Humans and AI actors both occupy seats. A user seat is a person on your team. A key seat is an AI agent or integration key. An AI actor with role bindings is an accountable identity, so it is counted like one.
• A fixed floor, then two meters. Seats and add-ons are prepaid. Above the volume the platform fee includes, usage is metered on workflow executions and requests, so the invoice follows how much you actually ran.
• End-users are not members. Apps you build get their own end-user seats; your users are your customers, not Orkestia's.
• Budgets bound agents. Agent spend is tracked per session and checked as the agent works, not discovered later.

What the subscription covers

The subscription includes a retention window for run history, and an allowance of executions, requests, storage and end-user seats. Lumen is a separate add-on, priced on its own tier plus telemetry storage and entries. Execution runs in your own cloud, so the compute, network, and storage for your resources are billed to you directly by your provider. Because compositions compile AI reasoning out of the hot path, you pay for AI reasoning when you design, not on every run.

Seats: humans and AI actors alike

Members can be users (humans) or keys (AI agents and service principals). Both are first-class actors and both occupy a seat (see Identity & multi-tenancy).

• User seats: people on your team who sign in and operate the platform.
• Key seats: Staff actors, hired AI workers with roles, approval gates, and an audit trail. Seat management is a governed workflow surface (subscription.*), so hiring an actor into a seat is recorded like any other run. A key seat tied to a named person on your team (a delegated agent) costs half of a full key seat. Over MCP, whoami on an agent token reports the actor's seat_mode.

End-user seat packs

People who sign in to apps you build are end-users, not members, and are not billed like your team. End-user capacity comes in seat packs attached to your org's subscription. This model is in early access, and the details are set with each organization. The cap is a hard login cap with forgiving semantics: over-cap users can still register but not sign in, and unlock the moment a new pack lands. This is what makes "Sign in with Orkestia" viable for consumer-scale apps.

Agent spend tracking

An agent call consumes the workflow-execution meter like any other run: if one call fans out into several runs, each run counts, and the key seat stays the identity charge only. Model spend is a different axis, and agent sessions carry a model cost you want to see and bound. Agent-session spend is computed from a price catalog of model rates, rolled up per session, per actor, and per org, and shown on the Staff console's Cost & pricing surface.

Budgets: bounding what an agent may spend

Governance is not only about what an agent may do but how much. The agent substrate carries budget primitives (agents.budget-check, cost entries per session) so an actor's spend is checked against its budget as it works. Combined with approval gates, you control both axes: authority (RBAC) and spend (budgets).

Org subscription (prepaid)
├── platform              (catalog, console, API, MCP)
├── user seats            (your team)
├── key seats             (your AI workforce and integrations)
├── end-user seat packs   (users of apps you build)
└── add-ons               (longer retention, extra storage, Lumen)

Usage (metered above the included volume)
├── workflow executions   (one engine run; agent calls consume this)
└── requests              (API, webhook and ingest hits)

Agent session spend       (tracked, bounded per actor by budgets)

Where to manage it

• Billing and subscription: owners manage the subscription, payment method, and seat counts from org Settings. Checkout and invoicing are Stripe-backed.
• Lumen plan: Lumen is an add-on with its own tier, plus telemetry storage and entries; integration traffic bills as requests, never twice as entries. Enable it under Governance → Observability (Lumen). See Enable Lumen.
• Cost & pricing (Staff console): per-actor and per-session spend, model pricing, budgets. See the Staff console.
• Programmatic: subscription state and seat operations are subscription.* workflows. Browse them at reference.orkestia.dev or discover them over MCP.

Ask your AI assistant

List the subscription.* workflow types in my org and tell me which ones are read-only.

Show me my organization's current seat usage: member seats, actor seats, and end-user packs.

How much has each of my Staff actors spent this month, and which ones are close to their budget?

For AI agents

Where to go next