Billing Overview

MarkDocket uses a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) billing model. You pay for the features and IP intelligence operations you use — there are no fixed seat fees and no hidden tier upgrades required to access core functionality.

The Pricing Catalog

All prices originate from a single versioned Customer Pricing Catalog that is shared across every surface of the MarkDocket platform — the web app, the API, the CLI, and the hosted MCP endpoint. When pricing changes, the catalog version is updated and all surfaces update simultaneously.

Key properties of the catalog:

• Versioned contract. Each catalog has a version identifier. If the catalog version your client received does not match the active catalog on the server, the billing endpoint returns a service-unavailable response rather than displaying a balance calculated under a stale rate card.
• No monetary literals in the UI. Pricing numbers shown in the dashboard and on the pricing page are always fetched live from the API. Neither the web app nor the landing site contains hardcoded price values.
• Sub-cent precision. Rates for high-volume operations (such as per-token or per-byte charges) are stored and displayed with full decimal precision, not rounded to the nearest cent.

How Usage Is Measured

Every billable action you take — running an agent turn, executing a trademark search, generating a patent draft, or calling a tool via the CLI or MCP — produces a usage event. These events are recorded reliably before any charges are applied to your account.

Usage events fall into two categories:

You are billed for feature usage only. Infrastructure costs are MarkDocket's responsibility and are never passed through as additional line items.

Account States

Your billing account can be in one of the following states:

Active

Your account is in good standing. All features are available subject to your usage.

No charges yet

You have a MarkDocket account but have not yet incurred any billable usage. This is the normal state for new accounts. All features remain available.

Billing required

A requested action requires billing authorization that your account currently cannot satisfy — for example, you need to add a payment method, or a spending limit has been reached.

When this happens, MarkDocket surfaces a billing block — a structured notification that tells you exactly what is required and what action to take. Billing blocks appear:

• As a dialog in the web app (regardless of which feature triggered the block)
• As a structured error in the CLI output
• As a structured error in MCP tool responses
• As an event in any active agent or automation stream

The billing block includes the specific reason and the action required to unblock your account. No partial operations are silently dropped — the block is raised before the operation completes.

Billing unavailable

The billing service is temporarily unreachable. MarkDocket distinguishes this state from "no charges yet" — a service outage is never reported as a zero-balance account. If the billing service is unavailable, you will see an explicit notice rather than misleading account data.

Agent Turns and Billing Authorization

When you send a message to the MarkDocket AI agent, billing authorization happens before your message is processed and before any file attachments are accepted. This ensures:

• You are never charged for an operation that was not authorized.
• Uploads and processing do not begin until your account is confirmed eligible.
• If authorization fails, the turn is rejected cleanly with a billing block notification explaining what is needed.

This pre-authorization also applies to automation runs that include agent nodes. If a billing block occurs mid-automation, the run is suspended (not failed), and you can resolve the block and resume the run.

Automations and Billing Blocks

Automation runs that encounter a billing block are suspended at the blocked step. The run status changes to indicate it is waiting on billing resolution. Once you resolve the block — for example, by adding a payment method — the run can be resumed from where it paused. Suspended automation runs are not counted as failed.

CLI and MCP Billing

When you use the MarkDocket CLI (@markdocket/cli) or connect via an MCP client, billing works identically to the web app:

• Each tool call is subject to the same PAYG pricing as the equivalent action in the web dashboard.
• Billing blocks are returned as structured errors in CLI output and as structured MCP tool errors, so your automation scripts or MCP-connected tools can detect and surface them programmatically.
• Usage events from CLI and MCP tool calls appear on the same account usage report as web app actions.

Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)

If you configure your own AI provider keys under Settings → AI Provider Credentials, those keys are used exclusively for agent nodes inside Automation Runs. BYOK is not available for interactive agent chat, drafting workflows, or other direct platform actions.

When a BYOK key is used, MarkDocket records only the MarkDocket feature usage for that action. AI provider costs for BYOK operations are billed directly to your provider account, not through MarkDocket.

Viewing Your Usage and Charges

You can review your current usage and billing information from the Billing section of the MarkDocket dashboard:

• Usage summary — a breakdown of billable actions taken during the current billing period, organized by feature and operation type.
• Pricing catalog — the current rate for each operation, fetched live.
• Account state — your current billing status and any actions required.

If the billing section shows "Pricing temporarily unavailable," this indicates a transient connection issue between the app and the billing service. Refreshing after a short wait will typically resolve it. Your usage data is preserved and not affected by display-layer outages.