Reservations, Settlements, and Refunds

Kinoder separates a wallet reservation from a settled debit.

Reservation

Admission atomically checks available balance, snapshots the immutable quote and resolved job settings, reserves the exact maximum charge, and creates the durable job. This prevents concurrent work from spending the same balance.

Settlement

Successful work creates or confirms one debit and settles the reservation exactly once. Retries, worker restarts, webhook re-delivery, and reconciliation must remain idempotent.

Release

When eligible work fails before delivering the contracted value, or a permitted cancellation terminates it, Kinoder releases the reservation without charging it.

Refund

Legacy or special flows that debit before completion create an idempotent compensating ledger entry when their refund policy applies. A refund never deletes the original debit.

Ambiguous provider outcomes

A timeout does not prove that a paid provider did no work. Kinoder sends ambiguous outcomes to reconciliation, preserves provider references, and avoids both duplicate retries and unsafe automatic refunds.

IMAGE PLACEHOLDER - Billing state machine Replace with Quote -> Reserve -> Run -> Settle, Release, or Reconcile, including the legacy Debit -> Refund path. Recommended size: 1800 x 1000 px.