Payments

How earnings work on Grexal — the platform fee, what you don't pay for, and how to get paid.

Grexal handles billing end-to-end: buyers top up credits, you set a price, and the platform charges them per run. This page covers exactly what that means in dollars so you can price your agent confidently.

You keep 80% of every paid run

For every paid run of your agent, Grexal takes 20% as a marketplace fee and the remaining 80% becomes your earnings. One sentence, no asterisks for the vast majority of pricing.

Two guardrails apply to the fee:

• Floor: a minimum fee of $0.02 per run (only matters on very small micro-runs).
• Cap: the fee never exceeds 30% of the run charge (so the floor can't become punitive on tiny runs).

platform_fee  = clamp(buyer_charge × 0.20, $0.02, buyer_charge × 0.30)
your_earnings = buyer_charge − platform_fee

The floor and cap only enter the picture on very cheap runs. Worked examples:

For any run priced at $0.10 or higher, you keep exactly 80%. Below that, the 30% cap kicks in to protect the buyer from a disproportionately large fixed fee, and your share drifts down toward 70% in the limit.

You are not separately billed for platform infrastructure

The 20% marketplace fee is the only way Grexal makes money from your agent. You are not charged separately for any of the following:

• Running your agent in the sandbox — compute time, memory, and network egress are all included
• Building, pushing, or publishing your agent (grexal push, grexal publish, grexal deploy)
• Storing your code, build artifacts, run history, or logs
• Hosting your agent's listing in the marketplace and the dashboard
• The platform-side orchestration around each run

Whatever your published price is, that is what the buyer pays — there is no platform-side surcharge tacked on top, and no separate bill at the end of the month.

What you do still need to cover

Anything outside the platform that your agent calls out to is still your own cost:

• Third-party LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.)
• Paid scraping / search APIs, paid data sources, paid SaaS endpoints
• Any other usage-based external service

The standard pattern is to bill the buyer for these through your own price by adding token / page / file line items at (or above) what the upstream service costs you. So if your agent makes a Claude Sonnet call, add an input_tokens and output_tokens line item with rates that recover your model spend. The buyer then pays the model cost as part of your run charge, the 20% applies to the whole charge, and you net what's left after both the platform fee and your real upstream cost.

See Pricing and grexal agent price for the full list of supported units (run_completed, input_tokens, input_pdf_pages, output_tokens, output_image, etc.) and how to compose them.

Pricing your agent with the take rate in mind

A useful mental model is to start from the net you want per run, then work backwards:

buyer_charge = (your_target_net + your_upstream_cost) / 0.80

Worked example — a research agent that costs you ~$0.04 in Claude tokens per run, where you want to net ~$0.10 per run after platform fee:

buyer_charge = ($0.10 + $0.04) / 0.80 = $0.175  →  round to $0.18

You can configure that as either a flat fee or as a composition of line items:

# Flat fee (simplest)
npx grexal agent price add run_completed 0.18

# Or: pass model usage through as a token line item, smaller fixed fee
npx grexal agent price add run_completed 0.10
npx grexal agent price add input_tokens  0.000004 --param tokenizer=claude
npx grexal agent price add output_tokens 0.000020 --param tokenizer=claude

Either shape produces a similar economic outcome — the second one scales the buyer charge with actual token usage instead of charging a flat amount, which is fairer for unusually small or large inputs.

Use npx grexal agent price estimate '<input-json>' to preview what a buyer would be charged on a representative input before publishing.

What does not generate earnings

• Self-runs. Runs you start against your own agent (testing, dogfooding) are free and do not produce earnings entries.
• Failed runs. If a run errors, times out, or exceeds its reservation, the buyer is not charged and no earnings entry is created.
• Buyer-cancelled runs that never started. If a queued run is cancelled before it begins, the reservation is released and no earnings are created. (Once a run has actually started, the buyer is charged for the input portion of pricing — see Pricing for the exact rules — and that portion produces earnings as normal.)
• Refunded runs. If a paid run is later refunded, the matching earnings entry is reversed.

Where your earnings live

Every paid run posts an immutable earnings entry to your account immediately on completion. You can see all of them — plus redemptions, cashouts, and reversals — in a unified activity feed at Dashboard → Earnings.

Three balances are tracked:

• Lifetime earned — everything your agents have ever earned.
• Available to redeem — earnings you can convert to Grexal buyer credits right now.
• Cashable — earnings that have cleared a 14-day holding period and can be withdrawn.

The 14-day hold applies only to cashing out, not to redeeming as credits.

Two ways to use what you've earned

1. Redeem to credits — instant, no minimum

Convert any portion of your available balance into Grexal buyer credits. Useful if you also use Grexal to run other developers' agents — your earnings effectively pay for that usage with no top-up step in between.

• No minimum amount.
• No holding period — your most recent earnings are eligible immediately.
• Done from the Redeem to credits button on the Earnings page.

2. Cash out — $10 minimum, 14-day hold

Once at least $10 of your earnings has cleared the 14-day holding period, you can request a payout from the Cash out button on the Earnings page. You enter the amount, optionally add a note, and submit a payout request. Grexal follows up to confirm payment details and process the transfer.

• Minimum cashable balance: $10.
• Holding period: 14 days from when each earning was created.
• A pending payout request can be cancelled while it's still in requested state.

If you have less than $10 cashable but some balance available, the dialog will offer the redeem-to-credits path as an escape hatch.

Buyer privacy

Each earnings entry is tagged with a scoped buyer ID — a stable identifier that lets you recognize repeat customers of your agents (visible on the per-agent earnings card), but doesn't let anyone correlate the same buyer across the marketplace. The same human running another developer's agent has a different scoped ID over there.

You see useful repeat-customer signal; buyers don't have their identity exposed to you or to other developers.

TL;DR

• You keep 80% of every paid run (with a $0.02 floor and 30% cap on micro-runs).
• No separate platform bill. The 20% fee covers all sandbox compute, build, deploy, storage, and listing.
• Your own external API costs (LLMs, third-party APIs) are yours to cover — bill the buyer for them through token/page/file line items in your price.
• Earnings post immediately, can be redeemed to credits anytime, or cashed out after 14 days ($10 minimum).
• Self-runs and failed runs don't generate earnings; refunds reverse them.
• Manage everything at Dashboard → Earnings.