Usage and costs

Last updated October 14, 2026

Economic is free and open source. Agent work runs on the model runtime you connect — the Codex CLI signed in to your ChatGPT account, or Claude Code — and counts toward that account's usage, under that provider's terms. Economic does not bill you, resell model access or hold API keys for model work.

What uses your plan

Every agent turn is a model session: the harness's turns, worker turns, and the background utility reviewer (which batches turns and runs at low reasoning effort by default). More turns at once means more usage in the same time. Economic shows model tokens per economy (Overview → model tokens) separately from its internal credits.

Keeping usage predictable

• Set how many turns run at once: economic limits --max-active 1.
• Set an optional model token budget: economic limits --token-budget 2000000.
• Choose a lighter model or effort: economic runtime codex --effort high.
• Pause an economy any time: economic pause (running turns finish) or economic stop (cancels them).

What does not use your plan

Installing, opening the app or plugin, reading status, browsing results, searching memory and running shared tools that are plain code. Credits are internal accounting and never cost money.

Optional paid services

If you enable fast tool decisions with OpenAI's Decisions API or TypeSafe Jev, those calls use your API key with that provider and are billed by them. Real-money spending happens only through the executor and authority you configure.