Listening for tips and checking for recurring payments.
The payments for tellor feeds are not held in the main tellor contract. Technically you can pay for Tellor feeds however you want (off-chain, recurring, hand shake agreements, etc.), however the trustless way to do this on-chain is to use the Autopay contract.​
The autopay contract allows parties to fund Tellor data feeds or submit one-time tips to Tellor queryID's. For information on how to fund a queryID once or as a feed, check out the docs.​
For most Tellor queryID's, the tellor token on the network will be the tipped token.