Account, billing & limits
Everything about paying for Tanzanite in one place: your credit balance, what a run actually costs, and the controls that keep spending in check. For how pricing works overall, see Pricing & credits; this page focuses on managing your account and understanding usage.
Where to manage your account
Section titled “Where to manage your account”Open Account → Billing to see your credit balance, buy credits, and review an itemized history of every purchase and charge. Your account — balance and projects — follows you across every device you sign in on.
Billing in brief
Section titled “Billing in brief”Tanzanite is credits-only. Every feature is available to every account; one prepaid credit balance funds all paid work — cloud models, sandboxes, media generation, storage, and cloud-project rent. Local projects on the desktop app cost nothing: the on-device model runs entirely on your machine. Staff accounts skip the funds gate so internal work isn’t blocked by a $0 wallet; that is not a product tier.
What a run costs
Section titled “What a run costs”Pricing is by usage, measured in the tokens a run consumes, and priced in USD. There’s no flat per-run fee — a short chat costs little, a long autonomous plan with subagents costs more.
Every plan tracks token usage and cost live as it runs. Open the plan tree during a run to see cost accumulate step by step, so there are no surprises after the fact. Local projects on the on-device model have zero marginal cost — nothing is billed for them.
How usage draws down
Section titled “How usage draws down”Usage draws directly from your prepaid credits. The balance you see is available = credits − reserved − spent and can go negative (a settle that overshot, a refund, or a bonus clawback) — the number is real, never clamped. Before paid work starts, Tanzanite places a hold for the estimated cost and settles the exact amount when the work finishes — the held amount shows on your Billing tab so the balance you see is the balance you can spend. When credits run out, the run stops with “You’re out of credits. Add credits to continue.” — it does not park waiting for money. Top up, then start the run again. (A run stopped by a spend limit you set yourself is different: that one pauses and picks up where it left off. See Spend limits.)
Credits are prepaid, never expire while your account is active, and you can top up any time from Account → Billing (minimum $5). Checkout enforces a monthly add cap (how much you can add in one UTC calendar month; default $500). There is no separate per-purchase ceiling or balance ceiling — a single checkout can be as large as the remaining monthly cap. Optional auto-reload adds a fixed amount from your saved card whenever your balance drops below a threshold; each reload is capped (default $100). It’s a plain toggle on the Billing tab, and turning it off is always one click. You can also set an optional monthly spend cap there; hitting it stops work and points you at Billing, it does not use the out-of-credits sentence.
Spend limits pause; running out of credits stops
Section titled “Spend limits pause; running out of credits stops”Two different things can halt a run for money reasons, and they end differently:
- A spend limit you set — a per-run or per-project ceiling (“spend at most $20 on this”) — pauses the run when it’s reached: “This plan hit its $20 spend limit. Raise or remove the limit to continue.” The work is parked, not thrown away. Raise or remove the limit and resume — the agent picks up exactly where it stopped, keeping everything it had done.
- Running out of credits, hitting your monthly spend cap, or a suspended cloud project — stops the run. There is nothing to resume: add credits (or raise the cap, or pay the project’s rent), then start a fresh run. Everything already committed to your project is still there.
The short version: a ceiling you chose is a pause you control; an empty wallet is a stop.
Cloud-project rent
Section titled “Cloud-project rent”A cloud project is standing infrastructure (hosted git, storage, a sandbox that can be woken), so it carries a flat monthly price on top of usage — charged as a daily slice so a calendar month costs the advertised price. The auto-created General workspace and local projects are free. If a day’s charge leaves you at or below zero, cloud projects pause (files and history stay); adding credits clears the pause within seconds.
Budgets & guardrails
Section titled “Budgets & guardrails”Tanzanite is built so you’re never surprised by a bill or an action:
- Approvals. Sensitive tool calls — writing files, running commands — pause for your explicit approval before they execute.
- Budgets. Give a run a spend limit and it pauses at that ceiling instead of quietly overrunning — resume it with a new budget and it continues from where it stopped. An empty wallet stops the run outright; nothing is ever billed in the background to keep it going.
- Guardrails. The harness defines what requires approval and what is blocked outright. Administrators can tighten these in the harness editor.
- Cost visibility. Live cost tracking on every plan means you can stop, redirect, or cancel the moment a run heads somewhere you didn’t intend.
Resource limits
Section titled “Resource limits”Independent of money, each account has resource quotas — concurrent sandboxes, cloud projects, and hosted-repo storage — that keep any one account from monopolizing shared infrastructure. They’re generous defaults, not paywalls; if you hit one, the error names the exact limit.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- See how pricing works in Pricing & credits.
- See how runs consume usage in Chat, plans & goals.
- Billing question or a charge you don’t recognize? See Troubleshooting & FAQ.