Why We Require Payment Before Any Work Starts

It would be easy to let a task start the moment it's estimated and approved — technically, nothing stops that. We don't, on purpose, and the reason has less to do with collecting money and more to do with what a lack of that step tends to produce.

An estimate isn't a commitment

Anyone can generate an estimate by typing a description — that's supposed to be frictionless, it's how you find out what something would cost. But if estimating and starting work were the same action, there'd be nothing stopping a workspace from accumulating a dozen half-described tasks that quietly consume a month's plan hours before anyone actually decided to commit to all of them. Requiring an explicit order — a deliberate “yes, this batch, this total, go” — is a real checkpoint, not a formality.

Even hours you've already paid for go through it

This is the part that surprises people: a task within your plan's included hours still has to be bundled into an order and confirmed before it starts, even though no extra money changes hands for it. That's intentional. The gate isn't about payment specifically — it's about having one clear moment where scope gets reviewed before AI time gets spent on it, whether that time is free-within-plan or billed separately. Skipping the check for “free” hours would just mean the discipline only applies to money, not to effort — and effort is the thing actually being committed.

What it means day to day

• You can describe as many tasks as you want and see their estimates with zero commitment — nothing starts from that alone.
• When you're ready, you bundle whatever's pending into one order with a fixed total.
• Work begins only once that order is confirmed — a deliberate step, not something that happens by default.

It's a small amount of friction in exchange for a guarantee worth having: nothing runs on your account, or against your plan's hours, without you having explicitly said yes to that specific batch of work.