This guide answers one question in operational detail: how do you design a credit-based pricing model for an AI agent so that a credit's price stays aligned with the value it delivers, across every scale of use and every customer segment, while remaining profitable and explainable?

It is written for pricing leads, product managers, RevOps teams, and founders who need to move from "we should probably use credits" to a fully specified, defensible, governed pricing model. No prior familiarity with the source book is required — every framework used here is defined from first principles, though readers of the full book will recognize the deeper treatment of Economic Value Estimation (EVE), the Credit Design Structure Matrix, and the governance-as-value-driver argument that this guide operationalizes into a repeatable process.

The guide is organized as an IDEF0-style function model. IDEF0 is a business-process modeling standard in which every activity is described by its Inputs (what flows in), Outputs (what flows out), Controls (the rules and constraints that govern how the activity is performed), and Mechanisms (the people, tools, and systems that do the work) — commonly abbreviated ICOM. This structure was chosen deliberately: it forces every design activity to be explicit about what governs it and what supports it, which is exactly the discipline credit pricing design requires.