Honest about money

What's free.
What's not.
And why.

The ledger of the agentic internet is our goal. Keeping it honest is our mission. That mission — on day one and every day after — we do for free.

We are the honest broker.

The agentic internet is coming fast. Agents will call agents. MCPs will call MCPs. Tokens will flow across thousands of service boundaries, and nobody will have a clear picture of who used what, who owes whom, or whether the numbers add up.

Tally's first job — before routing, before intelligence, before any of the paid features — is to be the ledger. Immutable. Transparent. Yours. That is the foundation everything else is built on, and it is free because a ledger that isn't free isn't a ledger. It's a product. We are not a product.

Always Free

The ledger.

📡

Telemetry collection — yours, always

Every token you spend, every model you call, every MCP you invoke — collected, stored, and returned to you with full fidelity. No sampling. No limits. No expiry date.

This data is yours. Always has been. Always will be. We never sell it, aggregate it away from you, or use it to train models without explicit consent. You use your data however you want.

Full call log — model, tokens, latency, outcome, timestamp
Cost breakdown — what you actually spent, per call and rolled up
Export at any time — CSV, JSON, or via the API
Retained indefinitely on our infrastructure, or export to your own
🗺️

MCP usage visibility — who is using what

Running an MCP server? You deserve to know who is calling it, how often, and what it's costing them. That visibility is free.

Using someone else's MCP? You deserve to know exactly how many tokens you're burning through their service and what you'd owe them if they charged. That too is free.

Per-consumer call counts and token volumes on your MCP server
Usage attribution — which agent, which session, which call chain
Running cost estimate against published or custom rates
Complete audit trail — who called what and when
📒

The ledger of the agentic internet

As agents start calling agents, the call graph gets complex fast. Tally records the full chain — which agent invoked which MCP, which model was used, how many tokens flowed, where the cost landed. The ledger is the agentic internet's receipt. And receipts should be free.

Full call-chain attribution across multi-agent workflows
Cross-agent cost accounting — yours vs theirs
Immutable record — append-only, tamper-evident
Inspector dashboard — live and historical views, free forever
🐉

Donations always welcome.

Keeping the ledger free has real costs. If Tally has saved you money or made your life easier and you feel so inclined — reach out. Tally counts tokens all day. She appreciates every contribution to the hoard.

The sage advice.

Non-negotiable

Five things we will never do to you.

These are not preferences. They are hard architectural constraints. They protect you and they protect us.

🚫

No negative balances

When credits hit zero, invocations are rejected. Your service pauses. No debt is created. No bill arrives later.

📭

No invoicing

We will never send you an invoice for services already consumed. All usage is prepaid. There is no arrears mode.

💥

No surprise bills

Your credit balance is visible at all times. You know exactly how much runway you have. Nothing happens behind your back.

✏️

No manual balance edits

Balances are derived from the ledger. No one can type a number into a database field. The ledger is the only truth.

🔗

No billing in the execution path

Credits are the economic layer only. A billing service outage cannot cause your invocations to fail. The two are architecturally separate.

Free tier — what's included and what's capped

The free tier gives you everything in the ledger, full telemetry, and full MCP usage visibility. The caps exist to prevent unlimited bandwidth exposure — not to push you to paid features.

Included on free
Full telemetry collection, forever
MCP usage visibility — who calls what
Inspector dashboard — live and historical
Append-only ledger — immutable record
Export — CSV, JSON, API
One personal org + one team org
Capped on free
Monthly credit cap — hard ceiling, no overage
No auto-replenish (manual top-up only)
Routing intelligence — limited calls per day
MCP monetisation — not available on free
Managed billing — not available on free
Batch streaming — rate limited
Why it matters

Infrastructure billing, not SaaS billing.

Traditional SaaS invoicing creates risk on both sides. The prepaid credit model eliminates it.

Traditional SaaS invoicing
Tally Platform Credits
Payment timing
Month-end invoice after usage
Prepaid before usage
Surprise bills
Usage spikes hit your card after the fact
Balance visible at all times. Hard stop at zero.
Overages
Common. Often discovered weeks later.
Impossible. No credit extended. Ever.
Cash flow (for MCP providers)
Invoice, wait 30 days, chase, collect
Positive from day one. Credits paid upfront.
Accounts receivable risk
Real. Slow payers. Bad debt.
Zero. No receivables exist.
Scale risk
Unexpected usage spikes become your problem
Bounded by prepaid balance. No exposure.
Closest analogy
Monthly software subscription
CDN / cloud API / mobile prepaid
What we charge

Rates.

There isn't much to say here. That's the point. We have two billable things and both of them are genuinely, embarrassingly simple. There are no tiers to decode, no overage clauses to hunt for, no magic discounts that require a sales call.

If you'd like to understand why we made it this way — read our business model. It explains the thinking behind every number on this page.

Billable thing one

LLM Routing Recommendations

Every time Tally recommends which model to use for a call, that's a recommendation. One cent each. Any volume. No tiers.

Volume per month Per recommendation
Any volume $0.01
10,000 recommendations = $100. That's the whole formula.
Free accounts get recommendations on 10% of calls at no charge.

Founding pricing — subject to revision.
Billable thing two

MCP Token Monetisation

If you use Tally to charge consumers for your MCP, we take a cut of what they pay. You keep the rest. Managed billing included — no extra charge.

10%
of gross consumer credit purchases.
  • You set your own per-token or per-call rate
  • You embed your margin inside your credit price
  • Tally takes 10% of what consumers pay for credits
  • Managed billing included — no extra charge
  • You keep 90%. Always.
No monthly fee. No setup cost. We only earn when you earn.

Start charging for your MCP →

There is nothing in Tally
you couldn't do yourself.

You could write a routing algorithm. You could build a telemetry pipeline. You could wire up Stripe and build a metering system. All of it is possible. None of it is your core work.

The agentic internet is going to need infrastructure. Not products. Not platforms that lock you in and extract rent. Infrastructure — shared, open, improving continuously because everyone who uses it contributes to making it better.

That is what Tally is. We build it once. We improve it together. We cooperate as we welcome the agentic web — because a web where every participant builds their own metering, their own ledger, their own routing is a web full of waste, inconsistency, and mistrust.

Let's not do that.

The Tally Ledger — agentic call chain (sample)
your-agent
→ search-mcp / query("Q4 results")
1,240 tok
$0.001
your-agent
→ claude-haiku / summarise
3,800 tok
$0.003
partner-agent
→ your-mcp / enrich(record_id)
620 tok
balance: 4,820
partner-agent
→ gpt-4o-mini / format-report
2,100 tok
$0.003
every call. every token. every agent. recorded.

Welcome to the
agentic web.

Agents will call agents. MCPs will call MCPs. The call graphs will be deep and the token flows will be vast. Someone needs to keep the honest record of all of it.

That someone is Tally. And the ledger — always — is free.

Next section

Our Business Model

Understand the thinking behind every number on this page.