Stars as currency

An Apollo Space agent spends a morning working on your behalf: it reads a thread, runs a search, fires an external tool, sends a WhatsApp message. Four vendors, four currencies, four price lists — inside a single task. At month’s end you don’t want four bills to reconcile. You want one number you can read at a glance. That number is a Star — Apollo Space’s single unit of consumption. It folds a pile of heterogeneous vendor costs into one meter you can read, cap, and plan around. Here’s why it works that way.

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The natural question

“Why not charge directly in dollars for each call the agent makes?”

It’s a fair question. The answer has three parts.

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1. Cost heterogeneity

A single conversation with an Apollo Space agent triggers, within seconds:

• LLM tokens (prices vary by model, input vs. output)
• Public search (price per Tavily call)
• External tool execution (price varies by Composio toolkit)
• Outbound messaging (price varies by country + WhatsApp tier)

Each of these carries its own price, in its own currency, updating at different frequencies. If you had to track each one in raw dollars, the dashboard would be unreadable. Stars provide a common unit. You track your org’s spending in ONE metric, without reconciling heterogeneous costs.

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2. Experience stability

Vendor prices (LLM, Tavily, Twilio, Apify) change. If Apollo Space charged you the vendor’s raw price in dollars, every upstream change would become a change on your invoice — a planning headache. With Stars, Apollo Space absorbs upstream fluctuation and keeps the translation “X action = Y Stars” stable within a cycle. Significant price changes are announced in advance.

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3. Caps make sense in Stars

Spending caps (“up to 1,000 Stars per day on this agent”) are easy to configure and understand. Caps in dollars (“up to $4.73/day”) would feel arbitrary and would need recalibration every time upstream prices shift. Stars give you caps that stay stable over time.

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When your team sees the balance

The Stars balance is visible to the org’s team in the Settings → Billing panel. Who can see it:

• Owner / Admin — total balance + history + caps
• Member — can view the total balance (cannot modify)
• Viewer — cannot see it (read-only access to CRM, no billing)

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When the end customer does NOT see Stars

When the recipient of a message Marcus sent opens WhatsApp — there’s nothing about “Stars” in the message. Stars are internal to Apollo Space; they never appear in communications with end customers. The recipient only sees the message Marcus composed, in their normal inbox, appearing to come from you (or from the Twin of the leader who triggered it).

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Converting to money

There is a conversion between Stars and real currency — when you buy packs or pay for a subscription, it makes sense to know the dollar equivalent. The current conversion rate is shown in the Billing panel — it may change over time as upstream costs and market positioning evolve.

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Next steps