Pricing and billing

Prices are per million tokens, in US dollars, and published in full. GET /v1/models returns the same figures and needs no API key.

Prices are per million tokens. Some open models with strong African-language performance carry non-commercial licences and cannot be served by any provider. They are absent from this list rather than silently swapped for a weaker model.

Your balance

Prepaid, denominated in US dollars, and it does not expire. Top up from $1.00 in your own currency on the balance page.

There is no subscription, no card on file and no monthly minimum. A new account gets a starter balance ($0.02) to try the API on four inexpensive models, which is a few hundred requests depending which one you pick. After that you top up or redeem a code. See Quickstart for the list.

Units in the API

A cost appears twice in every response, and the pair is deliberate:

Field	What it is
cost_micros	An integer count of micro-dollars, where 1 micros = $0.000001. This is the figure of record. Sum these; they carry no floating-point error
cost_usd	The same number in dollars. So a log line is readable without knowing the scale

The same pairing appears on /api/v1/balance as balance_micros and balance_usd.

Streaming reports it too, on the include_usage frame — see Streaming. Both paths carry the same dawnstack block, so one parser reads either. A stream that fails part way sends no usage frame and therefore no cost, and is still billed for what it generated.

Reserve, then settle

Output length is unknowable before a request runs, so a single debit afterwards would let an empty balance run work we had already paid for. Instead:

1. Reserve. The worst case is priced from your max_tokens and held. Not enough balance is a 402 here, before any provider spend.
2. Run.
3. Settle. The provider returns real token counts, the actual cost is charged and the remainder released.

Three things follow, and all three are visible in your ledger:

• A reservation you see mid-request is not a charge. It comes back.

• A provider failure returns the whole reservation. A failed call costs nothing.

• Billing is on the counts the model returned, never on our estimate. The estimate exists only to size the reservation, and the reservation prices your whole max_tokens budget as output, so it is normally well above what a request actually costs. The excess is refunded.

  This bullet used to claim the estimate “errs high for African languages”. That was backwards. The estimate is roughly four characters per token, an English approximation, and a language that tokenizes less efficiently produces MORE tokens per character, so for those languages the input estimate reads low, not high. It is corrected here rather than quietly deleted because it is a statement about how you are billed.

Rounding

A charge rounds up, to the micro-dollar. At these unit prices rounding down would make small requests free, which is a hole rather than a courtesy. The smallest possible request costs $0.000001.

Reasoning tokens are billed

A model that thinks before answering is billed for the thinking, even though it is never returned to you. On a short reply this can dominate: the same one-line answer costs about $0.00001 on one model and about $0.003 on another. Models marks which ones these are.

Streaming bills identically

Same reservation, same settle, same ledger entry. A disconnect is not a free request: the model keeps generating after you hang up and our supplier bills us for those tokens, so you are billed for what was produced before you left.

Paying in your own currency

Prices are set in US dollars because that is what our own costs are in. You are charged in the currency you pick at checkout, converted at the day’s rate, and the exact total is shown before you confirm. You receive the full dollar amount you bought: the processing fee rides on top and never comes out of the balance.

What we do not do

• No monthly commitment, no seats, no tiers.
• No charge for a failed request.
• No silent repricing. A price change appears in the changelog and never retroactively changes what an existing balance is worth.