Commitment
Flat-Rate Ownership Modes
Predictable economics are part of sovereignty. A surprise meter is a dependency.
How it works today
What rented token APIs actually cost
Hosted APIs sell capability by the token. The more your product works, the more you pay. Finance cannot forecast; product cannot ship a feature that might 10× usage overnight.
Prices move with subsidies, capacity, and whoever is dumping inference this quarter. You do not own the runtime, so you cannot cap the bill by buying a box.
The meter is not a rounding error. It is the business model: your growth is their revenue, and your data is on their wire while the meter runs.
Data path — today
Every token is a line item. Scale is a surprise bill on a runtime you do not own.
How Recursion does it
Same software. Own it or rent it flat.
The same Courier software runs in the cloud or on your Mac. Rent Courier Cloud at flat rates, or buy a commercial license and keep production workloads on owned Apple Silicon.
Cloud is still a choice — for teams that want managed capacity without a token lottery. Local is the ownership mode: license the runtime, run on hardware you already have.
That is what beats rented token APIs on cost: stop paying per thought. Pay for a machine or a flat cloud, then use it.
Data path — Recursion
One runtime: commercial license on your Mac, or flat-rate Courier Cloud — no per-token meter.
Ownership modes
- Courier Cloud: rent the same software at flat rates instead of a usage lottery.
- Commercial license: run production on owned M-series Macs — currently $300/mo for that license path.
- Local Scout remains the individual path onto the same local-first stack.
What we are not selling
- A promise that electricity and hardware are free — you still buy Macs and power.
- A claim that every hosted competitor is more expensive on day one of a prototype. The point is production scale and predictability.