AsaleHow Asale saves you money
Six mechanisms, from a structural discount to not being billed for failures — and one that turns your own idle plan into a rebate.
1. The discount is structural
A seller's idle quota has already been paid for. Its marginal cost is zero, so it can be offered below list price and still be worth offering. That is why the market clears under list at all — and with sellers plentiful, as low as 10% of vendor list price.
It is not a promotion and there is no date it ends. It is also not a fixed discount: when buyers outrun the sellers who are online, the price rises to list and the saving disappears until supply catches up. See How models are priced.
2. You pay per token, not per month
No subscription, no seat, no minimum, no floor. An account that sends nothing for a month is billed nothing for that month.
For anyone whose usage is spiky — a hard week, then three quiet ones — this alone is usually the bigger number.
3. Your own plan first, tool by tool
The Buy switch is per tool, so you choose which ones are allowed to spend. Leave the tool you run against your own subscription switched off; turn on the one you reach for once that subscription is spent.
You never pay the market for capacity you already own, because the tool that owns it was never pointed at the market.
4. Cache hits are preserved
Prompt caching is where most of the saving in a long agent session lives, and it depends on hitting the same upstream account repeatedly.
Asale keeps a session pinned to the same seller for ten minutes, so your cached prompt stays warm. Cache reads are priced separately and far below fresh input tokens.
5. Failures are free
You are not billed when:
- the request errors,
- usage returns zero,
- you disconnect mid-stream,
- a seller drops out before sending you a byte — the request is silently retried elsewhere.
A pre-authorisation freeze is not a charge; the unused part comes straight back.
6. Sell what you don't use
The other half of the ledger. If you hold a subscription and use a fraction of it, the idle remainder can pay for the part you do use — and in the common case of an over-provisioned Max seat, for rather more than that.
Sell overnight; during the day let your own subscription do the work and keep one tool switched on for the overflow. Your plan covers the hours it was bought for, the market covers the rest, and the idle hours pay for both.
What it does not save
Asale does not make a model cheaper to run, and it is not free capacity. If your usage exactly fits your subscription and never overflows, the honest answer is that you should sell rather than buy.