Billing#

Billing in Net is a record of commercial facts, not an invoicing system. Each redeemed payment emits an immutable net.billing.event@1; the stream of those events is what a provider exports into whatever actually invoices, reconciles, or reports. Net writes the facts; your systems do the accounting.

Immutable events, one per redemption#

When the engine serves a paid invocation, it emits a signed net.billing.event@1 carrying references and amounts — a billing_event_id, an idempotency_key, the capability, the quote_id, a verification_ref, the payer and payee (entity IDs), the network and asset, the amount (atomic units), and a timestamp. It carries no customer PII — no names, addresses, or account records. The event is append-only; it is never mutated after the fact.

The billing stream#

BillingLog is the surface:

• subscribe() — a live broadcast of billing events as the engine emits them;
• read_all() — the durable history;
• export_jsonl(dest) — copy the verified lines out to a destination for downstream systems.

The idempotency key makes the stream safe to consume more than once: the same redemption never double-bills.

What billing is NOT#

• Not an invoice. No line items, tax, currency conversion, or customer balance. A net.billing.event@1 is a usage fact; turning facts into an invoice is the provider's (or a partner's) job.
• Not a ledger of custody. Net didn't hold the money; the event references a settled on-chain transaction, it doesn't represent a balance Net keeps.
• Not a customer record. Identities are entity IDs; commercial identity, if needed, is an opaque reference resolved in provider systems — never a customer profile embedded in the event.

The lifecycle hooks doctrine: billing is the last step of a served invocation, emitted from the same engine that verified and redeemed it — so a billing event exists only for work that was actually paid for and served.