# Pricing | Chersus

![](/brand/carapace-hero-tilted.svg)Pricing
# Billed per character, not per token.

A PII redaction on a 50-character string should not cost the same as one on a 5,000-character document. Input volume is the fair proxy, so that is what we bill: rates per 1K characters per step, in five tiers. You can compute your bill before you spend anything.

Free 0 – 50K characters / month

Output characters never billed

Rates step down as you grow

A halted run bills only what ran
Rates
## The first 50K characters every month are free.

No credit card, every service at full quality. Above the free allowance, marginal rates per 1K characters, per step:

### Free

0 – 50K characters / month

€0

Zero friction for hobbyists

### Standard

50K – 5M characters / month

€0.04

per 1K characters, per step

Instant time-to-market

### Scale

5M – 50M characters / month

€0.02

per 1K characters, per step

Cheaper than hyperscaler LLMs

### Corporate

50M – 500M characters / month

€0.01

per 1K characters, per step

Predictability at corporate scale

Volume500M+ characters / month

€0.005per 1K characters, per step

... which is cheaper than internal DevOps teams

Estimate your bill

## Cost calculator.
Input characters per month+ Average steps per runAverage steps per run
Every executed step bills the characters it processes. A month is its input volume times the average number of steps a run executes, so a two-step pipeline bills twice what a single service does on the same input.

Estimated tier

Scale

€338.00

blended rate €0.028 per 1K

How the tiers work
## The rate steps down as you grow.
€0.04€0.02€0.01€0.005€0free€0.04€0.02€0.01€0.01Your calculation - 0 – 50K50K – 5M5M – 50M50M – 500M500M+
Cumulative monthly characters →
Edge cases
## Edge cases, answered.
How does chaining affect my bill?+
Every executed step bills the characters it processes, at your tier's rate. A three-step run costs three times a one-step run on the same payload, and a workflow loop that executes ten steps costs ten. Routing between steps is never billed, and a stop condition halts the count where it fires.
What counts as an input character?+
Every character a step processes, whitespace included. Output characters are never billed on their own, but a transform changes the payload, so a step after a redaction processes what the redaction left it.
What happens when a run is stopped or fails?+
A stop condition halts the run, so steps that never ran never bill. A run that fails part-way bills only the steps that completed. Rejected requests and failures on our side bill nothing.
What happens when I cross a tier boundary mid-month?+
Rates apply marginally inside each tier. The first 50K characters are free every month, and each block above them costs its own tier's rate. The chart above shows exactly this.
Do the 50K free characters reset?+
Yes. The free allowance resets with each monthly billing period and does not accumulate.
What does 500M+ pricing look like?+
We tailor volume pricing to your workload and infrastructure needs, including dedicated single-tenant European CPU clusters. Contact us with your monthly volume.

## Start computing your bill.

Create an account, copy your key, and the first 50K characters are on us.
[Request access](/en/signup/)[Read the chaining guide](/en/docs/chaining/)