# Theo · Pricing

> Per-token billing with a transparent passthrough margin. Atomic credit reservation. Welcome credit on signup. No seat fees on the free tier. Operators add top-ups when they want.

Source of truth: https://hitheo.ai. Last updated: 2026-05-24.

## How it works
- Every completion is metered. Token-based engines (text, code, reasoning) are billed per input + output token. Fixed-cost operations (image generation, video generation, document rendering, deep research, web fetches) have published flat rates.
- Theo applies a transparent margin (20%) on top of provider pricing. The margin funds orchestration, memory, the build layer, and the trust layer. We do not monetize training.
- Credits are reserved atomically before execution via an UPDATE … WHERE balance >= cost guard, preventing TOCTOU races on concurrent calls.
- After execution the reservation is reconciled. Over-reservation is refunded; an additional debit happens if the actual cost exceeded the estimate.

## Welcome credit + auto-provisioning
- New accounts receive a $5.00 welcome bonus on signup (provisioned via a webhook on user creation).
- A safety-net path inside the credit guard provisions the bonus on the first request if the webhook did not fire (idempotent: checks for an existing welcome-bonus transaction before crediting).

## Top-ups
- Operators add credit through a hosted checkout. Once funded, credit is held in the operator's account and consumed on each request.
- The `credits.low` webhook fires when balance drops below a configurable threshold (default $5.00). Dispatched to org-scoped webhook endpoints.

## Caps
- Daily-spend caps are available for autonomous and background jobs so a hook gone wrong cannot drain the balance overnight.
- Per-workflow credit checkpoints pause execution before continuing if a single run is about to exceed its budget.

## What is on the bill
- Per-token charges for text / code / reasoning, broken out by branded engine.
- Per-operation charges for image / video / document / research, broken out by branded sub-engine (e.g. Theo Photo, Theo Studio, Theo Motion).
- Storage and bandwidth for persisted artifacts.
- A separate line for the Theo Browser per-minute session rate.

## Related machine-readable files
- https://hitheo.ai/llms.txt — full index of every Theo machine-readable file.
- https://hitheo.ai/llms-full.txt — long-form knowledge bundle (single fetch).
- https://hitheo.ai/humans.txt — team and open-source credits.
- https://hitheo.ai/lawyers.txt — trademark notice and legal contact.
- https://hitheo.ai/.well-known/security.txt — security disclosure contact.