Pricing your agents

A practical guide to setting prices that earn real money at scale — without pricing yourself out of the market.

How pricing works

When you publish agents on Envelope, you set the price deployers pay every time your agents run. Envelope retains a fixed 10% platform fee and pays the remaining 90% to you via Stripe Connect.

Per run — Charged each time the agents are invoked, regardless of token count. Best for agents that complete a defined, bounded task.

Per 1K tokens — Charged based on how many tokens the run consumes. Best for open-ended tasks where output length varies significantly.

Recommended ranges

Per-run pricing

| Complexity | Agents | Price range | |---|---|---| | Lightweight | 1–2 agents, short tasks | $0.01 – $0.05 / run | | Mid-complexity | 3–5 agents, chained reasoning, tool use | $0.05 – $0.25 / run | | Heavy | Long-context, many agents, multiple rounds | $0.25 – $1.00+ / run |

Per-1K-token pricing

Platform compatibility — Per-token billing requires the deployment platform to report exact token counts on each run. Currently supported on Paperclip. Relevance AI does not expose token counts via its API — teams deployed there will not generate billing events under this model.

| Markup | Price range | Notes | |---|---|---| | 2–5× model cost | $0.002 – $0.01 / 1K tokens | Where most API resellers land |

The 3–5× rule of thumb

Charge 3–5× your underlying model API cost per run.

If a 5-agent run costs you ~$0.01 in Claude or GPT API calls, pricing at $0.04–$0.05/run gives you healthy margin while staying cheap enough that deployers don't think twice about it.

Managed runtime agents: price on value, not compute — If you use the HTTP adapter in managed mode, Envelope runs a hosted model on your behalf — and covers that inference cost as part of its 10% platform fee. Your effective underlying cost is near zero. Price toward the value the agents deliver, not your compute spend.

The Envelope sweet spot

For most agents, $0.05–$0.10 per run is the sweet spot:

Enough to earn real money at scale — 400 runs/month = $18–$36 after Envelope's fee
Low enough that a Paperclip company would rather pay it than rebuild the agents themselves
Competitive with the cost of calling the underlying models directly

Thinking about deployer value

Price based on what the agents save the deployer, not just what it costs you to run.

A sales outreach agent that books one extra meeting per month is worth far more than $0.05. A customer support agent that deflects 10 tickets is worth far more than $0.10. If your agents deliver clear, repeatable value, price toward the higher end of the range.

Revenue at scale

| Price | 100 runs/mo | 400 runs/mo | 1,000 runs/mo | |---|---|---|---| | $0.05 / run | $4.50 | $18.00 | $45.00 | | $0.10 / run | $9.00 | $36.00 | $90.00 | | $0.25 / run | $22.50 | $90.00 | $225.00 |

Figures shown after Envelope's 10% platform fee.

Updating your price

You can update pricing on a published team at any time — either in the editor or via the API. Price changes apply to new runs immediately.

From the editor — Open the team editor and go to the Team section. When the team's visibility is set to Public, a Distribution settings block appears inline — showing your billing model, price field, and the Allow forking toggle. Changes are saved when you save the team.

Allow forking — The Distribution settings block also contains an Allow forking toggle. When enabled (the default), any logged-in builder can fork your published team into their own workspace and customise it. Disable this if you want to prevent others from building on top of your design — owners can always fork their own teams regardless of this setting.

Receiving your earnings

Envelope pays builders via Stripe Express — a lightweight Stripe account that handles identity verification, tax forms, and payouts to your bank automatically. You keep 90%; Envelope retains 10%.

One-time setup — takes about 5 minutes:

Go to your Account page and scroll to the Payouts section.
Click Set up payouts. You'll be redirected to Stripe's Express onboarding — enter your business details and bank account.
Once your account is verified, your status shows Payouts enabled. Earnings are deposited automatically at the end of each billing cycle.

Payout timing — Payouts are batched per billing cycle. Stripe typically settles to your bank within 2–7 business days depending on your country. You can check your payout history at any time from the Stripe Express dashboard linked in your Account page.

Not seeing earnings? Make sure your Connect account status shows Active — if it shows Setup incomplete, click "Complete Stripe setup" to finish verification. Runs completed before your account was active are not retroactively paid.