No seats. No platform fee. No minimum you have to grow into. Four meters, defined below to the byte, and a statement that prints your agreed rates verbatim every month. This page is an instrument, not a table — it tells you which meter will dominate your bill and what to ask us for.
The most expensive thing in usage-based pricing is ambiguity about what a unit is. So here is every edge case we have ever been asked about, written down before you ask.
Counts: one payload sealed at origin, relayed, and opened at destination. Multi-hop routes count once per hop, because each hop is its own key agreement, attestation and audit entry.
Does not count: envelopes refused at attestation; envelopes that expire unopened on the route TTL; sandbox traffic; retries under the same Idempotency-Key.
envelope opened →Counts: ciphertext bytes measured on the wire as they pass through the relay, summed across hops. Envelope headers and attestation records are included — they are bytes we moved.
Does not count: payloads sealed and opened entirely inside your own infrastructure on a self-hosted relay; retransmissions caused by our own node draining; sandbox volume.
envelope opened →Counts: peak concurrent key-pairs in active state during the calendar month. Peak, not average — you should not be able to game the meter by rotating at midnight.
Does not count: pairs in grace after rotation; revoked pairs; sandbox pairs; the escrow shares of a quorum, which are one logical pair however many custodians hold it.
envelope opened →Counts: completed mutual-attestation handshakes, and key rotation ceremonies, which are attestations with a quorum attached.
Does not count: failed attestations — ever. You do not pay for something refusing to prove itself. Also excluded: cached attestations reused inside their 300-second TTL, and every sandbox handshake.
envelope opened →Set the two rails to roughly what you move in a month. The readout names your band, tells you which meter will dominate your statement, and prefills a rate-letter request with your quantities. No dollar figure appears here, because your rates are yours and they live in your agreement.
Rails snap to detents like key bitting. Fully keyboard operable — focus a rail and use the arrow keys; each detent is announced.
NETWORK
A multi-system mesh — several origins, one or more dashboards, an archive, and agents in the middle.
Request your rate letter →Rates are fixed in your agreement and printed on every statement. We don't do surprise math.
Every seal, relay, open, rotation and attestation is metered at the moment it happens and written to your audit chain. The portal shows quantities live — you never wait until the 1st to learn what you used.
At 00:00 UTC on the 1st the period closes and the statement is generated, hashed, and committed to your audit trail. From that moment its contents cannot change — a corrected statement is a new document with its own hash.
Autopay draws by ACH fifteen days after issue. Card is supported and visually secondary — ACH is preferred and always will be, because the fee difference belongs to you rather than to a processor.
Settlement writes a receipt into the same hash chain as your envelopes. Your finance record and your security record are the same record, verifiable with the same tool.
Published price lists move. They get "simplified", re-tiered, and re-bundled, and the announcement always arrives after the decision. We would rather your rate be a term of a contract than a row in a marketing table.
So: your rates are fixed in your agreement, printed verbatim on every monthly statement so you can check them without opening a filing cabinet, and cannot change without ninety days of written notice. If we ever want to charge you differently, you get a quarter of a year to disagree.
What we will tell you publicly is exactly what the units are, exactly what does and does not count as one, and which unit is likely to dominate your statement at your shape. That is the part you need to plan with. The arithmetic is yours and ours, not the internet's.
Zero. That is the number of dollars of platform fee, seat fee, onboarding fee, support tier, or minimum commitment. If nothing is sealed in a month, the statement is a single line reading no metered activity, and no draw occurs.
No. There is no minimum spend, no minimum term beyond the notice period, and no floor quantity. A month in which you seal nothing produces a statement reading no metered activity and draws nothing.
We have clients whose volume is seasonal by a factor of forty. Charging them a floor in February to subsidise August would be a financing product, and we are not one.
Nothing happens, because there is no overage. Overage is an artefact of tier-based pricing — a penalty for mis-forecasting yourself into the wrong bucket. Everything here is metered, so a busy month is simply a larger quantity at the same rate.
Your rate letter may include volume steps that make the rate lower above certain quantities. It will never include a step that makes it higher.
Never. Sandbox key-pairs (sk_test_) route through an isolated relay and are excluded from every meter — payloads, GB, key-pairs and attestations alike.
You should be able to load-test your integration at three in the morning without anyone in finance noticing. Sandbox envelopes expire after 24 hours and cannot address production peers in either direction.
They can, and they are optional. An annual commitment fixes your rate for twelve months and typically improves it, because predictable volume genuinely costs us less to provision relay capacity for.
What a commitment never does is create a use-it-or-lose-it balance. Unused committed quantity is not forfeited; it simply means you paid the committed rate for less traffic than you expected. If that happens twice we will proactively suggest a smaller commitment.
Because each hop is a genuinely separate cryptographic event: its own ECDH agreement, its own attestation exchange, its own audit entry, its own relay capacity. Counting a four-hop route as one unit would mean the routes that cost us the most to carry are the ones we charge least for — which ends, eventually, in a price rise for everyone.
Counting per hop also gives you a lever. Collapsing an unnecessary intermediate hop reduces your bill and your attack surface at the same time, which is the sort of incentive alignment we want.
Yes, and we would prefer you did. Every statement carries a hash committed to your audit chain. Export the period with GET /v1/audit, run krypt-audit-verify from any SDK, and count the metered events yourself.
If your count and ours disagree, ours is wrong until proven otherwise, and the correction is issued as a new statement with its own hash rather than an edit to the old one.
Rate letters are written by a human, usually within one business day, and are valid for ninety days.