The 1% fee

Every billed request is provider list price × 1.01 — itemized in the trace as two lines, provider cost and the 1% fee, never blended into one opaque number. It applies uniformly whether you pinned a model explicitly or routed with model:"auto". See live per-model pricing at /models or /pricing.

Prepaid credits

Your org spends against a prepaid USD balance, decremented per request. A balance at or below $0 gets a hard 402 on every live key — test keys are unaffected, since they never touch a real provider or a real balance (see Authentication).

Topping up

From /settings/credits, a top-up charges card or ACH via Stripe Checkout. The amount you enter is the net credited to your balance; the gross charge adds a separate, disclosed Stripe fee — priced as an exact pass-through of Stripe's real per-charge cost (2.9% + $0.30), not a flat rate, so it always covers what card processing actually costs regardless of deposit size — the same honest framing as the fee you'd pay depositing into any competing aggregator, just itemized rather than hidden in the rate. A minimum deposit of $10 applies, so the fixed processing cost doesn't dominate a tiny top-up.

Manual top-ups are rate-limited (a few per hour) to prevent runaway Checkout Session creation — hitting the limit returns a 429 topup_velocity_exceeded.

Auto-reload

Configure a threshold and a top-up amount from /settings/credits — once your balance falls below the threshold, your saved payment method is charged automatically, bounded by a daily cap you set (up to a platform-wide ceiling). Auto-reload disables itself after repeated consecutive failures rather than retrying indefinitely against a broken card.

Per-key spend caps

Separately from your org's credit balance, an individual key can carry its own monthly_spend_cap_usd — a hard ceiling on that key alone. Once a request would put the key within its final stretch of budget, its max_tokens is automatically clamped to what's left rather than letting one call blow past the cap. See Authentication for the full set of per-key policy fields.

Tracking spend

GET /api/credits returns your balance, the current minimum deposit and Stripe fee rate, and recent transactions. The /usage dashboard rolls this up further: spend over time, savings vs. frontier pricing, model mix, and latency.