Credits & Billing

Your account holds a USD balance and each request deducts its exact token cost. Pay-as-you-go has no fixed fee. Paid plans (Go, Pro, Pro+, Max) add a monthly price for included credit and higher limits; see Pricing & Plans. Manage everything at the Credits dashboard: Subscription (your plan), Pay as you go (balance, top-ups, invoices, history) and Payment methods (saved cards; auto-charge is coming soon).

Two kinds of credit

Usage is charged to plan credit first, then bought credit. Total balance is the sum of both. The monthly plan credit is granted on activation and each renewal, and a retried payment never double-grants.

Getting your first credits

The Free plan has no monthly credit and no signup bonus. It has a 5-request trial on free and decision models. Two low-cost routes both give you Go:

• Subscribe to Go ($2/mo): $4 in credits every month, plus free models (anyrouter/free and :free, no daily cap) and decision models.
• Donate a provider key to the shared pool: one working key no other account has donated grants Go for free (same $4/mo). The pool also serves your own requests free while the key stays valid.

On any plan you can top up and pay per token, or use BYOK (your own keys never deduct credits). On Free, purchased credit pays for paid models only: a paid model with no purchased credit returns 403 paid_models_require_credit, and free models still need Go after the trial.

How costs are calculated

Prices are on the models page. Example for anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6:

Input:  1,000 tokens @ $3.00/1M  = $0.003
Output: 500 tokens   @ $15.00/1M = $0.0075
Total: $0.0105

If 800 of the 1,000 input tokens were cached: $0.00024 + $0.0006 + $0.0075 = $0.00834 (20% less).

Topping up

Top up any amount from the Credits dashboard via Polar. Very small amounts may be declined by the processor; try a larger one.

You choose the credit amount. Polar, the Merchant of Record, charges it plus a 5% + 50¢ processing fee, and AnyRouter keeps $0 of that fee. Polar may add sales tax on the card; tax is not extra credits.

Purchased credit lands in bought credit and is spent after plan credit. Polar emails a receipt; turn billing emails off under Notifications.

{
  "error": {
    "code": "insufficient_balance",
    "message": "Insufficient credits. Your balance is $0.00. Please purchase credits at /dashboard/credits, add your own provider key (BYOK) at /dashboard/byok, subscribe to a plan at /pricing, or donate a free key to the shared Pool at /dashboard/byok/new?donate=1. Free models need the Go plan.",
    "metadata": {
      "type": "insufficient_credits"
    },
    "actions": [
      { "type": "top_up", "label": "Top up credits", "url": "https://anyrouter.dev/dashboard/credits?topup=1" },
      { "type": "add_byok", "label": "Add your own provider key (BYOK)", "url": "https://anyrouter.dev/dashboard/byok" },
      { "type": "subscribe", "label": "Subscribe to a plan", "url": "https://anyrouter.dev/pricing" },
      { "type": "donate_key", "label": "Donate a free key to the shared Pool", "url": "https://anyrouter.dev/dashboard/byok/new?donate=1" },
      { "type": "use_free_models", "label": "Keep going on free models", "url": "https://anyrouter.dev/docs/features/free-tier", "model": "anyrouter/free" }
    ]
  }
}

Checking your balance

The Credits page shows both buckets, total balance, total spend, today's cost and the transaction history. From the API:

curl https://anyrouter.dev/api/v1/credits \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk-ar-your-key"

{
  "balance": 12.53,
  "monthly_balance": 8.0,
  "topup_balance": 4.53,
  "plan_credit": 8.0,
  "bought_credit": 4.53,
  "used": 12.47,
  "today_cost": 0.42,
  "currency": "usd"
}

balance is the total. monthly_balance (also plan_credit) is spent first; topup_balance (also bought_credit) after.

curl "https://anyrouter.dev/api/v1/credits/transactions?limit=20" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk-ar-your-key"

Every chat completion response also includes usage (prompt_tokens, completion_tokens, total_tokens, cached_tokens) so you can compute cost client-side with the model's published pricing.