Settlement ceiling

The 3x rule that bounds how far a charge can rise above the estimate, when it applies, and why a multi-provider route never goes above its hold.

A price-per-result or provider-reported charge can come back higher than the estimate that sized the hold. looot bounds how far above it can go.

The rule

The charge is min(what the provider actually reported, hold × 3). Anything the provider reports above that ceiling is recorded for review and never charged to you. This applies to:

• a direct run on one endpoint,
• a job run with no fallback,
• and a fallback route that ends up able to run only one provider, which settles the same way a direct run would.

On your own connected key, an attempt is capped at its own price times the same factor (the BYOK fee only; $0 for a fee-only row).

Multi-provider routes are different

A fallback route with more than one runnable provider never charges above its hold, full stop. The 3x allowance only applies to the single-provider case above. This is on purpose: a route with other providers to fall back on has no reason to let one provider’s overage push the total past what was reserved.

Bounded by what you can actually pay

On top of the 3x ceiling, a charge is also bounded by what your organization can pay: this run’s hold plus whatever balance no other run is holding. A route lowers its own charges to that bound before it settles, so what you see charged, on the run and in the ledger, always matches what you were actually able to pay.

Worked example

A job:web.scrape.markdown run on steel-scrape holds $0.005 (its list price) with maxAttempts: 1. The provider reports an overage and bills $0.012 for a longer page. Since $0.012 is under 3 × $0.005 = $0.015, the full $0.012 is charged. If it had reported $0.02, only $0.015 would be charged and the rest recorded, not billed.