Agile Coretime Renew Pricing Explained

I already explained among other details how renewals work in this post. Here I want to go into more details on how your renewal price will be determined.

The first concept to realize is that your renewal price is always pre-determined, you know exactly what you are going to pay beforehand.

Ok, so when is the price of your renewal determined? There are three options:

1. When you bought your core regularly previously (call to purchase)
2. When your legacy auction model lease expired
3. At your previous renewal (previous call too renew)

Now that we know how the price is determined, that you are paying in renew, let's look into how it is determined in each of those cases:

Renew after regular purchase

If you are renewing the core for the first time, after you purchased it regularly in the previous cycle, then the price for your renewal will be exactly the price you paid on that earlier purchase.

Renew for lease holding chains

There used to be some confusion, which I want to clear up a bit here. Matters are a bit complicated because a sale in period X is for period X+1 and in that sale, parameters are set.

What happens exactly is that if your lease is going to expire in period X+1, this will be noticed at the sale rotation in sale X. It will still grant you a core for the entire period X+1, even if your lease ended technically in the middle of that period and it will mark the core eligible for renewal in that period X+1. The third thing it does, is what lead to confusion: It also removes the lease from the state already: Conceptually your lease ends in period X + 1, but it already gets removed in period X (after you got granted your final period of coretime and the renewal rights). Hence UIs, which directly read the state will show that you no longer have a lease, despite the fact that you still have a core and also can not yet renew.

For the actual price: The renewal right is given in the sale before, which only has the sale data of the sale even before that. Therefore you will be able to renew at the sellout price of the sale X-1, if your lease expires in X+1.

Renew after renew

You already renewed before. In that case, the price for your renewal had been determined at that previous renewal, like this:

Either the price you paid for your previous renewal, increased by the configured renewal bump (3% on Kusama right now) or the market price at that time of the renewal: Whatever is cheaper.

In the interlude phase of the sale (the first part where the open market is not yet opened), this will usually be the bumped previous renewal price, except the market price dropped significantly over the sales.

What you can technically do, to reduce the price of your next renewal is to not renew in the interlude, but in the leadin: If you wait long enough, the price will be lower than the bumped renewal price and you get a better renewal price at the next cycle, but:

1. In the leadin period the market is already open, so your renewal is no longer guaranteed, you can be outbid.
2. If you are willing to accept some risk to lower your cost, a regulare purchase makes actually more sense as you will get the achieved lower price immediately at that purchase , instead of just setting that lower price for your next renew.

Summary

1. Your renewal price is always determined beforehand (previous renewal, expired lease, previous purchase). You will always know one cycle ahead of time how much your renewal will cost.
2. Your renewal price will increase each sale cyle. The best way to reduce it again is to accept some risk and do a regular purchase on the open market (leadin phase) instead of renewing. The risk can be controlled: The sooner you buy in the leadin (the higher the price still), the lower the risk of getting outbid.
3. The renew price you pay for an ended release will be the sellout price of the sale before the previous one: It is predetermined a full cycle ahead of time.

I hope that cleared things up! Happy core time!