How billing works

No subscription, no seats, no tiers. Dustav is metered: you hold a prepaid balance, and every piece of work debits it based on what that work actually cost to run — the real AI cost of the read or the reply, plus a fixed margin. A cheap month is a cheap bill by construction.

The mechanics

• Top up in chunks ($50 / $100 / $250) by card, dollar-for-dollar onto your balance. New businesses start with a $50 starter credit — the first stretch is on us.
• Every action is priced. Reading an email costs what reading that email cost. Setting aside a newsletter costs a few cents; a long thread with a PDF costs more. A chat turn, a workflow collection, a reminder: same rule, priced individually.
• Pauses at zero. When the balance runs out, Dustav stops working and says so — it never runs negative, and there is no surprise bill. Top up and it picks the backlog right back up.

You can see every cent

The Usage & cost screen shows the whole ledger: what was read, what was drafted, what each of it cost, down to the individual model call. The headline number and the detailed chart are computed from the same records, so what you're told always reconciles with what you can inspect. We price the AI honestly and visibly on purpose — a product billing you per email read should be able to show you each one. (Cost & caching covers the engineering that keeps the per-email number small.)

Why metered, and not a subscription

Because the work varies. A flat fee has to be priced for the heaviest inbox, which overcharges everyone else; a per-email price has to gouge the cheap emails to cover the expensive ones. Metering means the quiet week costs you almost nothing and the launch-week flood costs what a flood costs — and you can watch it happen live rather than discovering it on an invoice.

It also keeps our incentives pointed the right way: Dustav earns by doing your work, not by your forgetting to cancel.