📖What it means

The chat service pays for an action: responding to a user is itself a budgeted task, and that budget covers the action the reply carried out. Earlier wording, kept as history: Chat pays for the asking; the service that performs the action pays for the doing. A conversation turn is charged to the Chat lane, but the moment an action runs it opens its own record of work naming the track of the service that is really being operated, and both the spending limit and the spending report read that name first.

📖Easily confused with

[{"term": "Which subscription served it", "distinction": "The payer is the SERVICE whose work it was; the subscription is only the vendor door the request went through. A cap never names a subscription."}]

📖Nuance

The name on the work is the only signal that survives being carried out under somebody else's identity: an action runs under the chat's identity, so every rule that reads identity says 'chat'. An action on another service's droid is charged to THAT service. Where the payer is genuinely ambiguous — an agent whose service runs several lanes — no payer is named rather than one being guessed at. RETIRED IN PLACE 2026-09-17 (Ninad, 2026-09-17, CLI-461, Rulings Repo agent-resources #34): the clause that the service performing the action pays for the doing is superseded - the chat service pays for an action, because responding to a user is itself a budgeted task. Work an action starts is an activity and still bills the task of the droid that runs it. Brought into line 2026-09-17: an action's work ticket now carries the chat turn's own payer on and names no other track, the receipt names the chat's service as billed, and the action catalogue's billed_service and billed_track columns are retired in place (their values kept as history).

📖Also called

- cost attribution
- who is billed
- charge-back

📖Filed under

Category: money.

Service: Cost Center.