Your agent picks the machine, signs one x402 payment, holds it for as long as the job needs, and hands back what it did not use. Settled on Hedera, so the bill it pays is one anybody can recheck.

Not the hour most hosts bill for them. The meter counts seconds and stops the moment the job does.

When credits hit zero the machine is held, not destroyed. The agent tops up and the job continues from where it stopped.

Unused seconds return to the wallet the moment a session closes. No expiry, no leftover balance to write off.
Built on the rails that make this possible.
x402 settles one request at a price you already know. Compute does not work like that. Nobody can say how many seconds a job needs until it has run, which leaves you guessing up front or signing thousands of tiny payments as you go.
Pinout sits in the middle. You buy a pool of credits once, a meter draws them down while the work happens, and whatever survives is refunded when the session closes.
You hand over a job and a spending limit. It works out what hardware that needs, pays for it over x402, and gives you back whatever it did not use. This is a real session from the deployed service, replayed.
Cut me out of this clip and put a gradient behind me.
A job and a spending ceiling. Nothing about which machine to use.
Reads the catalogue, matches the job to a lane, and signs one x402 payment.
Seconds are checkpointed to a Hedera topic as the work happens.
Credits reach zero. The machine is held and the meter stops.
A second x402 payment, and the same process carries on from where it stopped.
The job completes and the machine is handed straight back.
Seconds bought but never used return to the agent's wallet on chain.
Settlement anchors to a HIP-991 topic that anyone can recompute from the mirror node.
Your agent reads this catalogue and picks what the job needs. Prices are all-in: accelerator, vCPU and memory, billed per second held. No minimums, no egress fees, no reservation.

Serve a model for the seconds a request needs, with no idle hour attached.

Long runs that top up mid job rather than dying when a budget lapses.

An agent with a wallet buying its own hardware, inside a ceiling you set.

Diffusion, matting and vision work, billed for the seconds it actually took.
Four platform properties make per-second settlement practical. No other network offers all four.
Hedera's facilitator signs as fee payer and submits on the agent's behalf. The agent's balance moves by the price and nothing else, so it carries no separate gas float to monitor or refill.
Consumption is checkpointed to a Consensus Service topic with a running hash maintained by consensus nodes. The party issuing the bill is not the party building the audit trail.
Every settlement is anchored to a HIP-991 fee-charging topic at real, unrecoverable cost. Publishing final numbers is expensive by design, which makes inflating them expensive too.
Every record sits on Hedera's public mirror node. No key, no signup, no rate-limit agreement. And no smart contract anywhere in the system, both tiers are Consensus Service.
Every session is itemised down to the second, with the charge and the refund recorded as they happen. Below is live activity, straight from Hedera.
Reconcile any invoice yourself with the open-source verifier, or hand a session id to your finance tooling and let it check the arithmetic.
# rebuild the bill from public data, not from our word for it $ npm run verify -- 3c145a57-d8d5-4c7e-a974-9f92426e075e PASS contiguity contiguous [0, 141) across 5 checkpoints PASS tier-binding anchor commits to seq 142 + running hash PASS arithmetic 141 x 30000 = 4,230,000 tinybar PASS burn-count ledger count 141 matches events received PASS commitments all 5 checkpoint commitments match VERIFICATION PASSED bill recomputed from the mirror node
The machine is held and the meter stops, so the wait costs nothing. The agent tops up and the job resumes from where it stopped. If no top-up arrives within the grace window the machine is released and the balance refunded.
No. On Hedera the facilitator pays the network fee and submits for you, so your agent holds exactly what it plans to spend and nothing else.
None. Metering and settlement both run on Hedera Consensus Service, so there is nothing to deploy, upgrade, or audit for reentrancy.
It runs on Hedera testnet today, against real CPU and GPU hardware. Mainnet is the next step. Current limits and economics are documented in the repository.