Credits & Billing

How credits work, how usage is calculated, and how to manage your balance. Free monthly grants, pay-as-you-go top-ups, and transaction history.

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Credits & Billing

AnyRouter uses a credit-based billing system. Your account holds a USD balance (credits), and each API request deducts the exact cost from that balance. There are no fixed monthly fees — you only pay for the tokens you actually use.

Free monthly grant

Every account receives a $5.00 free grant at the start of each month. This is automatically credited to your balance when you make your first request in a new billing period.

The free grant is enough for thousands of requests with most models. For example:

~250K output tokens from anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5
~50M output tokens from meta-llama/llama-3.3-70b
~25K output tokens from openai/gpt-4-turbo

Free grants do not roll over — unused credits expire at the end of the month.

How costs are calculated

Each API request is billed based on the model's per-token pricing:

Token type	Billed at	Notes
Input tokens	Model's input price per 1K tokens	The prompt you send
Output tokens	Model's output price per 1K tokens	The completion you receive
Cached tokens	Provider's cache-read rate (typically 10% of input)	Tokens served from cache
Cache write tokens	Provider's cache-write rate (typically 125% of input)	First-time cache population

You can see per-model pricing on the models page. Every model detail page shows both standard and cache pricing.

Cost calculation example

Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6
Input:  1,000 tokens @ $0.003/1K  = $0.003
Output: 500 tokens   @ $0.015/1K  = $0.0075
Total: $0.0105

Cached tokens reduce costs significantly. If 800 of the 1,000 input tokens were cached:

Cached: 800 tokens  @ $0.0003/1K (10% of input) = $0.00024
Input:  200 tokens  @ $0.003/1K                = $0.0006
Output: 500 tokens  @ $0.015/1K                = $0.0075
Total: $0.00834  (20% savings)

Topping up

When your free grant runs out, top up your balance from the Credits dashboard. Purchases are processed via Stripe. The minimum top-up is $1.00.

Purchased credits never expire — they remain on your balance until used.

Checking your balance

Dashboard

The Credits page shows your current balance, a breakdown of free vs. purchased credits, and a full transaction history.

API

Check your balance programmatically:

BASH

bash

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

Response:

JSON

json

{
  "total_credits": 25.00,
  "used_credits": 12.47,
  "remaining_credits": 12.53,
  "currency": "usd",
  "free_grant_this_month": 5.00,
  "free_grant_used": 4.23
}

Transaction history

List all credit transactions (purchases, usage, grants, refunds):

BASH

bash

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

Each transaction includes:

Field	Description
`type`	`purchase`, `usage`, `monthly_grant`, `refund`, `admin_grant`, `bonus`
`amount`	Positive for credits added, negative for usage deducted
`model_id`	The model used (for `usage` transactions)
`balance_after`	Your balance after this transaction

Insufficient balance

If a request would cause your balance to drop below zero, the API returns:

JSON

json

{
  "error": {
    "type": "insufficient_balance",
    "code": "insufficient_balance",
    "message": "Insufficient balance. Please top up your credits."
  }
}

The request is not processed — no tokens are consumed and no charge is applied. Top up your balance and retry.

Rate limits by plan

Plan	Rate limit	Free grant	BYOK
Free	60 req/min	$5/month	No
Pay-as-you-go	600 req/min	$5/month	No
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Yes

Usage in the response

Every chat completion response includes a usage object so you can track costs client-side:

JSON

json

{
  "usage": {
    "prompt_tokens": 5840,
    "completion_tokens": 120,
    "total_tokens": 5960,
    "cached_tokens": 5800
  }
}

Use these values with the model's published pricing to compute the request cost in your own code.