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An AI request raises three different accounting questions: how much computation the provider reported, what that computation cost the company and what the customer may be charged under the applicable terms. Gateway preserves the execution and provider evidence. The financial owners establish customer-money effects. A number in one category is not automatically the answer to the other two.

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Missing usage is not zero usage

Suppose a provider reports input and visible-output counts but omits reasoning usage. The known counts are useful, but adding them and calling the sum “complete usage” would hide a missing dimension. The design keeps evidence per dimension: known, estimated, pending or unknown. A reported zero is known zero. An absent field is not. Aggregates retain known and estimated subtotals alongside pending and unknown counts. They should not become a falsely precise total merely because the available subtotal is easy to calculate.

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An allowance is not a measurement

The planner may reserve room for reasoning and an answer. That is an execution control, not evidence of actual consumption. Similarly, a capacity or spend reservation can be conservative while a prior attempt is unresolved. It is not a provider invoice or a customer debit. A successful later attempt does not erase possible consumption from an earlier uncertain one.

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Provider cost needs its basis

Cost depends on usage evidence and the applicable price revision and billing basis. Gateway-computed cost is known only when the required usage dimensions and exact pricing basis are known. Effective marginal cost can differ from list cost. A subscription may legitimately make marginal effective cost zero while list cost is nonzero. That is different from simply lacking a price record. Later invoice or usage evidence becomes an attributable correction. It must not quietly replace the original basis or make an already-final customer settlement chargeable again.

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Customer payment is a separate decision

A provider can incur cost even when the application receives no useful answer. Conversely, provider usage evidence alone does not give Gateway authority to debit a customer. The selected direct-call policy identifies particular chargeable outcomes at known incurred cost, including successful execution, caller-attributed delivery failure and owner cancellation. An unknown provider outcome does not create a customer charge under that scoped policy. A priced application action has its own accounting context and must not receive an extra duplicate inference debit. These are design rules for the named billing contexts, not a tariff or a claim that the production financial path is qualified.

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A final call can still have unfinished accounting

Gateway records the call final and the required outbox notification together. That preserves the obligation to deliver the evidence to the financial owner. It does not say payment has already settled. The receiver may see the same notification more than once. It must resolve the original operation rather than debit again. A corrected notification revision also retains the original customer-money identity. Only a genuine, qualified result from the relevant owners can support the exact settlement receipt. HTTP success or a message saying committed cannot establish all those foreign effects by itself. Continue with The owners of a payment for the composed financial boundary and Execution evidence for retained history.