Per-job caps, reserves, and final charges

When you are charged

A job holds Service Credit before it runs and is charged only when it settles. Five facts decide what you pay:

1. Reserved before submission. Liskov reserves Service Credit when it commits to launching your job, before the job is sent to the network. The reserve is the job's reward cap at the rate locked when the offer was made. It is a ceiling, never an estimate and never a cost.
2. Charged at settlement. Credit is charged only when the job settles, after the evidence of its execution reports is final. If that final evidence shows no report was filed, the charge is zero and the whole reserve is released. If the evidence is unclear, the reserve stays held and the item is under review; Liskov never guesses.
3. A job that never runs costs nothing. A job that is sent to the network but is never matched to a processor, never starts, or never reports settles to a zero charge, and its reserve is released. Liskov bears whatever the network kept.
4. Only the consumed reward is charged. The charge is the job's reward budget minus what the network returned when the job was ended, converted at the locked rate and never more than the reserve; the rest is released. Liskov absorbs every network transaction fee: no fee to deploy a job, end it, or make any other transaction is ever charged to you. Whether the run succeeded or failed is not part of the amount. A completed run is typically charged a fraction of its reserve.
5. A pending reserve is a ceiling. While a job's money is pending, you see a reserved amount held against your balance, shown as "up to" that amount. Your available credit is your balance minus open reserves. The charge appears only at settlement.

From per-job cap to final charge

Liskov separates authorization and settlement so a customer can review a bounded commitment before work proceeds. Before a run, you see the per-job cap you authored and the reserve the run would open (per-job cap × jobs). There is no separate pre-launch cost estimate: the reserve is a bound, not a quote.

Read each amount correctly

• A policy cap is the maximum authority authored for a job or generation.
• A reserve temporarily reduces available Service Credits so the bounded work can settle.
• A final charge is the amount actually debited after required evidence.
• A release returns unused reserve to available credit.

A reserve is not a charge and not proof of successful execution. A final charge can be below the cap and the reserve. A financial item can enter review when network evidence is incomplete or contradictory; Liskov must not guess.

For managed custody, a finalized scanner can instead prove that the strict report deadline passed with no execution report. That terminal case is not billed: the final charge is zero, the full linked reserve is released, and the closeout carries report_absent_not_billed. It is closed, not an amount in review, and needs no customer action. Pending, unavailable, outside-coverage, conflicting, or failed evidence reads still defer settlement.

Internal network settlement

The service may pay Acurast reward and native fees in network units, bounded by the effective policy. That is a Liskov treasury mechanic. Customer records stay denominated in USD Service Credits and should explain the related Application, deployment, job, and reason.

Execution evidence determines whether Liskov may settle a managed final charge. When Liskov submits a deregistration transaction, the amount the deregistration returned in its finalized chain events (the chain calls this the gross refund) determines how much of the reserved amount is released at the settlement's locked rate. The native transaction fee is recorded separately and is not part of your charge. Wallet balance movement corroborates those facts; it does not set the returned amount.

An included deregistration that returned zero means the transaction finalized and returned nothing. That is different from a case where no deregistration was submitted: there is then no chain coordinate and no returned amount. Missing chain evidence must not be presented as a zero return.

The managed zero-charge decision is made from report absence, not by erasing treasury facts. Liskov retains the admitted network budget, the amount the deregistration returned, processor payout, and deregistration fee for operator accounting. Those facts do not appear as a customer balance. Self-custody remains immutable ACU chain accounting and is never reclassified or reversed.

Verify

To read one Application's charges, open the Application and choose Spend. Recent charges lists its latest executions, one row each: Requested is what the execution reserved, Charged is its final charge, and Still holding is reserve that has not been released yet. A charge in review reads Not billed, with the status Under review by Liskov, and its hold stays under Still holding until it settles. The Charged figure above the table is the Application's final charges over the last 30 days, as Liskov computes them. Full ledger → opens Ledger for that Application, which remains the organization-wide record with each lineage's detail.

Open Ledger (from Billing & funding) and match the reserve, settlement, and release rows to the Application UID and deployment. A reserve is a ceiling, not a cost; open the lineage on a settled deploy_spend row to see the attempts behind it. Or page through read-only transactions:

proof liskov organization billing transactions ORGANIZATION_ID \
  --limit 25

Use --before EPOCH_MILLISECONDS for older records. Never infer a final charge by subtracting two browser-displayed balances; read the authoritative transaction record.

See Spend limits for authored authority and Billing, settlement, and retirement for a long-running reserve or review.