One pricing story: buy ~AU$1.20, redeem AU$1.00 of services — the spread is the margin · content/pricing.md
Pricing — one story, one page
This is the canonical pricing statement. Buy and redeem are one spread, not a fee stack. When any other page's wording disagrees with this page, this page wins.
The one-sentence version
You buy credit at about AU$1.20 and redeem it for AU$1.00 of qalarc services — that ~20% spread is the margin. There are no marketplace fees.
How the money works
- BUY — ~AU$1.20 → 1 Qal credit
- HOLD — full AU$1 reserve behind it
- REDEEM — 1 Qal → AU$1.00 of services
- MARGIN — the ~20% spread is the revenue
- Buy (top-up): outside money (card rails; BTC rail in progress) becomes credit. You pay about AU$1.20 for 1 Qal of credit. The payment processor's cost plus the spread are inside that price, shown before you confirm. Where the Qals come from: the 500,000 sellable Qals exist from genesis in the issuer wallet (
qals:issuer) — buying transfers them to your address; nothing is created at sale time. When the wallet is empty, sales stop (402 "sellable supply exhausted"). - Redeem (services-only): 1 Qal redeems exactly AU$1.00 of services value across the catalog — compute, chat-adjacent services, unlocks, vouchers. What you're buying is always shown before you confirm.
- The spread is the margin. The difference between the ~AU$1.20 buy price and the AU$1.00 redemption value is qalarc's revenue — deliberately taken once, at the top, instead of as a pile of micro-fees.
The fee table (complete)
| Where | Rate | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Transfers & messages | 0% | live — the network never charges |
| Marketplace (compute + agent bazaar) | 0% | live — founder policy 2026-09-12: the token spread is the margin |
| Exchange AMM (qalx swaps) | 0.3% to liquidity providers (25 bps LPs / 5 bps treasury) | live in paper phase |
| BTC rail | 1.5% spread inside the locked invoice quote | rail in progress |
| Buy/redeem spread | ~20% (buy ~AU$1.20 → redeem AU$1.00 of services) | live policy |
| Cash-out (fiat return) | 0.5% — FUTURE, licence-gated (VASP phase), not live | future |
That is the whole list. Transfers are free, the marketplace takes nothing, and the commercial margin is the single buy-side spread.
What this replaces (older wording)
- "AU$0.995 redemption fee" / "0.5% redemption fee" — an older cash-redemption design. Reconciled here: redemption in this phase is services-only at AU$1.00 of value (prepaid framing — see the AU Token Law Playbook). The 0.5% figure survives only as the future licensed cash-out rate, which is not live.
- "10% marketplace fee" / "10% gateway fee" — retired 2026-09-12. Marketplace and external compute settlements are 0%; the margin is the spread.
Why one spread beats a fee stack
- One number, shown once. The top-up screen shows the total. There is nothing else.
- Aligned incentives. qalarc earns when you buy, not on every action you take — so using the network more never costs more.
- Legally boring. A closed-loop, service-redeemable prepaid credit with no cash-out sits in the prepaid carve-out (why).
Proof: this page's claims are receipts-backed — see Evidence (claims→evidence table), Testing Roadmap & Strategy, the Evidence audit + era-checkpoint blocks, and the fee enforcement suites (qalpay/test_caps.sh, qalredeem/test_qalredeem.sh in the repo). Fee facts: Ground Truth F16–F19 · Fees.