Legal
What a token actually is
Not a currency - a unit of compute. The providers define it themselves, and here is the text.
Not a currency. A unit of compute. Here is the part where we do not ask you to take our word for it — the AI companies define it, price it, and license it themselves, and their own published terms say exactly what a token is and what you may not do with one.
1. The short version
A token is a unit of AI model usage: a piece of text or data that a model processes, counted, and charges for. It is metered per million. It is consumed the moment it is used. It is not money, it is not held, it does not appreciate, and nothing in this site offers one to you as an investment.
Where a token does mean cryptocurrency, that is on a cryptocurrency venue, under a different set of rules entirely. No cryptocurrency, blockchain token, or digital asset is traded on this site at any time.
2. The providers' own definitions
These are verbatim. Open the source and check them.
OpenAI — Services Agreement, §17 Definitions
“Usage Limits” means End User, messaging, token, throughput rate, or other limits on Customer’s use of the Services
OpenAI — Services Agreement, §4.1
Customer … (a) retains all ownership rights in Input; and (b) owns all Output. OpenAI hereby assigns to Customer all OpenAI’s right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output.
Meta — Llama 4 Community License, §1
“Llama Materials” means the Llama 4 model weights and related documentation licensed to you under this Community License
Read those three together and the whole picture is in them. OpenAI defines a token as a unit of usage measured against a limit, assigns you ownership of the output outright, and has no concept of a token as an asset. Meta licenses weights. Nobody defines the word the way a cryptocurrency venue does.
3. The clauses that decide who is allowed to resell
This is the part that matters for a desk, and it is why the discounted-token market looks the way it does. Here is what the major providers actually say — verbatim, with the clause that governs.
OpenAI — Services Agreement, effective 2026-01-01 · §3.3 Restrictions — what an account holder may not do
Customer will not, and will not permit End Users to: … (g) buy, sell, or transfer API keys from, to, or with a third party; (h) interfere with or disrupt the Services, including circumvent any rate limits or restrictions …
This single clause is why the discounted-token market exists the way it does. It is also why the desk does not touch it.
Anthropic — Commercial Terms of Service · Prohibited uses
Customer may not and must not attempt to (a) access the Services to build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models or resell the Services except as expressly approved by Anthropic
The clearest statement of the boundary anywhere: resale is possible, and it requires written approval. The desk respects that line exactly.
OpenRouter — Terms of Service · Prohibited uses
You may not access the Site or Service for purposes of reselling API access to Models or otherwise developing a competing service
The aggregators are not a supply route for a resale desk either, and they push the restriction down onto our own customers.
Meta — Llama 4 Community License · §2 Additional Commercial Terms
If … the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee … is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta … and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants
The outlier, and the useful one. Meta's community licence permits commercial use of the weights outright below that threshold. Self-hosted open-weight capacity is the one supply line the desk can resell on its own clear right.
Google — Gemini API Additional Terms · Grounded Results and Search Suggestions
You will not, and will not allow your end user or any third party to, cache, frame, syndicate, resell, analyze, train on, or otherwise learn from Grounded Results or Search Suggestions
Narrow, and worth stating precisely rather than broadly: this restricts the search grounding layer, not model capacity in general.
xAI — Terms of Service · Account use
You may not share your account credentials or make your account available to anyone else, and are responsible for all activities that occur under your account
No blanket resale clause — but the account-level restriction is the same idea.
4. What this means for the desk
Three of the clauses above prohibit pooling other people's credentials or trading API keys. That is precisely the mechanism behind the cheapest tokens in this market, and it is the mechanism a desk with any interest in existing next year does not touch. One of them requires written approval before reselling at all.
So the desk's rule is simple and it is the strict one:
- We do not buy capacity sourced from pooled, proxied, shared or trial-abused credentials. Not at any price, not as a stopgap, not quietly.
- We do not trade API keys. We do not buy them, sell them, or pass them on.
- We only sell capacity we hold the right to resell — self-hosted open-weight capacity under its licence, or capacity from a provider we have a written agreement with.
- We name the source. If you ask where a block of capacity came from, you get an answer.
- We publish our spread rather than burying it, because the margin is the smallest term in your bill and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
If a supplier ever offers us capacity below list with no clean provenance, we decline it. There is enough margin in being the counterparty you can audit.
5. The one honest caveat
Where a provider has not published a resale term — some of the Chinese labs publish pricing but not full commercial terms at a stable public address — the absence of a rule is not permission. We treat those as unconfirmed until we have a written answer, and we do not build a product on a supplier's silence.
Provider terms change. Everything above was read on 2026-09-29 and is linked so you can verify it and watch it move. The full analysis, including the clause most people miss — the one that voids a liability cap — is in our risk disclosure and the sources are public.
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