Sponsored AI Credits
Local-first Open ledger Now launching

Your agent is thinking.
Sponsored credits the wait.

SAI puts one quiet sponsor line in your coding agent’s wait state and records sponsor-funded AI credits — spent straight back on model calls through a local, OpenAI‑compatible gateway. Your code never leaves the machine.

Launch status: sponsors can fund campaigns through checkout, and qualified wait-state placements credit the developer wallet.

Install from source Sponsor inventory → no cloud account · sponsor-funded credits · one command to kill it
wallet 0.000 credits
sai · claude
§1

Install from source

python ≥ 3.10 · macOS / Linux / Windows caveats
$python -m pip install -e .
$sai login # local user + key, nothing uploaded
$sai claude # your agent, now with a wallet
§2

The loop closes on your AI bill

earn → hold → spend, all on your disk
01 · WRAP

No patches, no forks

sai claude runs your agent inside a real PTY and watches output timing — never content. The agent doesn’t know SAI exists.

Interactive terminals only. CI and headless runs are detected and left alone.

02 · WAIT

The card rides the spinner

When the agent goes quiet for 10 seconds, one text line renders under the wait state. At most one card every 75 seconds — tune it or shut it off.

Each qualified card records 0.005–0.006 sponsored credits into a local wallet file you can read with cat.

03 · SPEND

Credits meter the gateway

Point any client at the local gateway (/v1/chat/completions) and local credits are deducted per token. Earned waiting, spent thinking.

Sponsor-funded credits are recorded locally, then spent through the gateway against metered model usage.

§3

What does waiting pay?

default rates, straight from the source

Your agent’s idle time

How long does your agent spend thinking, per day? Count the spinners, the test runs, the long diffs.

45 min / day of agent wait

Normal frequency: a card needs ≥10s of quiet and cards sit ≥75s apart. Heavy agent users blow past an hour of wait time without noticing.

cards / day36
credits / dayCAPPED+0.205
covers (input tokens)3.1M / mo
covers (output tokens)1.0M / mo
+6.16 sponsored credits / month in the local ledger

Uses the repo defaults: ~0.0057 credits per card, 0.25/day cap, gateway rates of 0.002 per 1k input and 0.006 per 1k output tokens.

§4

Never leaves this machine

the schema is the contract
  • promptsNEVER SENT
  • source codeNEVER SENT
  • file pathsNEVER SENT
  • terminal outputNEVER SENT
  • shell historyNEVER SENT
  • repository URLsNEVER SENT

The runner tracks when output happens, not what it says. An event is eleven boring fields, and anything outside the schema is stripped before it exists. Audit it yourself: sai privacy schema

KILL SWITCH One command hard‑stops every sponsor surface, with a reason on the record: sai config kill-switch on
§5

For sponsors: buy qualified wait-state inventory

Stripe checkout · paid placements

A developer watching an agent think is a sponsored moment with measurable qualified views.

Sponsors create campaigns, pay through Stripe Checkout, and buy blocks of 1,000 qualified five-second placements. Credits are paid into developer wallets after qualified visibility.

  • ✓Qualified impressions only. A card renders after ≥10s of real agent wait, in an interactive terminal, never in CI.
  • ✓No fatigue by design. Cards sit ≥75 seconds apart with a hard daily payout cap — scarcity is the format.
  • ✓Developers opt in knowingly, because the card pays them in sponsored credits. Goodwill is the product model.
  • ✓Reporting follows the event schema. Rendered and qualified placements are recorded without prompts, code, logs, or terminal output.
What you buy, exactly
developer’s terminal · live
✦ thinking… 14s
+0.006 creditsYour Brand — Ship faster agent workflows yourcompany.com
✦ thinking…

That’s the unit: sponsor name, 3–80 characters of copy, a destination, and the payout visible to the developer.

§6

Fair questions

So… this is adware?
It’s one line of text, in a moment you were staring at a spinner anyway, that pays you in AI credits. It only appears in interactive terminals, never in CI, at most every 75 seconds. You control frequency (sai config set frequency low), and sai config kill-switch on stops every sponsor surface instantly. Adware doesn’t ship a kill switch on the front page.
What is a credit actually worth?
Credits are the unit the local gateway meters at the repo defaults — 0.002 per 1k input tokens and 0.006 per 1k output tokens. Sponsor-funded placements add credits to the wallet; model calls spend them from the same ledger.
Can you read my code or prompts?
No, and not as a policy promise — as a mechanism. The runner watches output timing through a PTY, never content. Events are sanitized against a fixed schema where code_uploaded, prompt_uploaded and logs_uploaded are hard-coded false. Run sai privacy schema and read the whole contract.
Why credits instead of cash?
Credits directly offset model calls in the local gateway, so the reward stays inside the developer workflow. Sponsors pay for qualified attention; developers receive usable AI credits instead of a separate cash-out flow.
What counts as an impression for sponsors?
A billable placement requires ≥10 seconds of agent wait, an interactive terminal, ≥75 seconds since the previous card, outside CI, and at least five seconds of visible time before qualification.
Does it work offline? Does it phone home?
The wallet, the ledger, the dashboard and the gateway all live on 127.0.0.1. The CLI uploads nothing today; the sponsor event schema documents the only thing that ever could. The default gateway response is even a deterministic local mock until you point it at an upstream.

The spinner is sponsor inventory.
Qualified waits fund AI credits.

Install it from the repo, connect sponsor inventory, and watch qualified placements fund the local ledger.

Get SAI ↑ Sponsor inventory
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