TaskGoblin has one billing relationship: you buy credits, and runs spend them. There are no plans, no seats, no monthly fee, and nothing to upgrade or downgrade. The promise is forecastability — you pay for the seconds a goblin actually works, at a rate you already know.
Pay for time, not tokens
Most AI tools bill against a moving target: model tier, token count, tool calls, context size. You cannot predict any of those before the work happens, which means you cannot predict the bill either.
TaskGoblin bills time. A run is metered per second, from the moment the agent starts working to the moment it stops, and charged at a flat per-minute rate. At the standard rate, $0.40 a minute is about $24 an hour — a fraction of an engineer, except goblins run in parallel, overnight, and on demand.
The three rates
The rate for a run depends on whose LLM account and whose infrastructure it used:
| What you bring | Rate |
|---|---|
| Nothing — our LLM account, our sandboxes | $0.40 / minute |
| Your own LLM account | $0.20 / minute |
| Your own LLM account and your own sandbox server | $0.10 / minute |
The rate is decided once, when the run starts, from the resources it was actually given — and it is recorded on the run, so a later price change never rewrites what you were charged.
There is deliberately no rate for bringing only your own infrastructure. See Bring your own sandbox server for why: TaskGoblin never injects its own provider credentials into infrastructure a customer controls, so a run on your server always uses your LLM account.
What counts as working time
Only the agent's active working time is billed:
- Billed — the agent reading the repository, planning, editing files, running commands and tests, and reporting back.
- Not billed — time a task spends queued, time a sandbox sits idle between runs, and the time you spend reading the result or writing a follow-up.
Metering is per second with no per-run minimum and no rounding up to the next minute: a 90-second run costs 90 seconds. A run that fails or is stopped by the watchdog is billed for the time it used before it stopped — failed work still consumed real compute — and never for more than that.
Your first $100 is on us
Every new organisation is granted $100 in evaluation credits, once, with no card on file. That is around four hours of agent time — enough to connect a repository, hand over real tasks, and judge the output before spending anything.
Topping up
Credits are bought as one-off card payments from your organisation's billing page, in whatever amount suits you. They do not expire and there is no monthly reset, so buying ahead costs you nothing.
If you would rather never think about it, turn on automatic top-up — it is available on every organisation and switched off by default.
When the balance runs out
A run already underway finishes; the balance may dip below zero rather than a goblin abandoning work halfway. New runs are then held until credits land, and the block lifts on its own the moment they do — nothing to re-enable, no support ticket.
Where to go next
- Bring your own LLM account — drop to $0.20 a minute by using your own provider account.
- Bring your own sandbox server — the $0.10 rate, and the security rule behind it.
- Automatic top-up — keep the balance from ever reaching zero.