Define and implement optional non-monetary credits and free-tier limits #83

Problem

TEST marks intents paid and records local earnings, but it is not a user credit balance or free-tier policy. There is no supported allowance, hosting-credit or per-account spending contract.

Proposed change

Offer an optional non-monetary allowance model for authenticated users with explicit issuance, reservation, consumption and refund rules, without requiring a wallet or implying a transferable monetary balance.

Acceptance criteria

• Decide whether allowances are fixed, periodically replenished or earned by hosting, and document abuse/Sybil assumptions and operator authority.
• Store auditable credit grants/reservations/consumption with bounded values and idempotent run/order linkage; expose remaining allowance through a versioned API and SDK/CLI.
• Test concurrent submissions, exhausted allowance, cancellations, unknown run outcomes, grant renewal and restart without double-spending or automatic refunds of uncertain work.
• Keep anonymous local TEST mode separately explicit and retain monetary activation as an independent optional feature.

Current evidence

unimplemented product feature; source inspection only, no new runtime reproduction. Backlog classification is based on source inspection; this issue does not claim a new runtime reproduction.

• internal/dispatcher/payments/payments.go: TEST creates an immediately paid transaction rather than checking a user balance.
• internal/dispatcher/transport/api/routes.go: The balance route is commented out.
• internal/dispatcher/database/queries/transactions.sql: Existing earnings belong to executors, not user allowance accounts.

Dependencies

• #88 — Replace UUID-cookie login with authenticated user sessions
• #89 — Enforce ownership and role authorization on every HTTP operation
• #35 — Make repeated submission return the same admitted run identities

Related work

These are integration points, not prerequisites for starting this issue.

• #77 — Define exact pricing units and reject overflow before persistence
• #66 — Enforce aggregate user and target-group egress budgets
• #99 — Enforce per-account request and concurrent-work admission quotas

Priority context

Optional adoption/economic-policy feature after core local usability; not a correctness prerequisite for TEST.

Activation

Optional work, deferred while the local team alpha is the priority. Development and fault injection use owned local fixtures. Production monetary operation, deployment and publication require the applicable release and operator approvals.

Validation must use owned local fixtures on supported Linux environments. Record the implementing merge request and relevant test results before closing this issue.

Imported from GitLab issue 82. Originally opened 2026-09-10. Historical GitLab links may require access to the original project.