Credits & Billing

AnyRouter uses a credit-based billing system: your account holds a USD balance and each API request deducts its exact cost — pay-as-you-go usage has no fixed fee, you pay only for the tokens you actually use. Subscribing to a paid plan (Go, Pro, Pro+, or Max) does carry its own fixed monthly price on top of that, in exchange for included credits and higher limits; see Pricing & Plans.

Overview

Your billing settings are organized into three surfaces in the dashboard:

A plan and pay-as-you-go credits work together: a subscription gives you included monthly credits and higher limits, while pay-as-you-go credits cover anything beyond that — and you can use pay-as-you-go on the Free plan without subscribing at all.

How it works

Two kinds of credits

Your balance is made up of two separate buckets:

Usage is always charged to your monthly credits first, and only spills into your purchased top-up credits once the monthly bucket is empty. So the credits AnyRouter gives you get spent before the credits you paid for, and your purchased balance lasts as long as possible.

Your total balance is simply the sum of the two buckets. The Credits dashboard shows each bucket on its own card, plus a combined summary with your total balance and total spend ("burned") to date.

Getting your first credits

The Free plan includes no monthly credit and no signup bonus. There are two low-cost ways to get started with included credits:

• Subscribe to Go ($2/mo) — includes $4 in credits every month, plus a 1000 req/day free-model cap (anyrouter/free). The Free plan includes 10 free-model requests/day and no monthly credit.
• Donate a provider key to the shared pool — this auto-grants Go for free (same $4/mo included credit) and earns you up to 8% of the tokens your key serves (8% on Pro/Pro+/Max, 5% on Go).

You can also top up your balance any time from the Credits dashboard and pay per token with no subscription, or use BYOK (your own provider keys never deduct credits).

How costs are calculated

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

Per-model pricing is on the models page; every model detail page shows both standard and cache pricing.

A worked example:

Model: 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

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

Cached: 800 tokens  @ $0.30/1M (10% of input) = $0.00024
Input:  200 tokens  @ $3.00/1M                 = $0.0006
Output: 500 tokens  @ $15.00/1M                = $0.0075
Total: $0.00834  (20% savings)

Topping up

Top up your balance from the Credits dashboard. Purchases are processed via Polar, and the minimum top-up is $1.00.

What you pay vs what you receive. You choose a credit amount (the base). Polar, our Merchant of Record, charges that base plus a 5% + 50¢ processing fee. AnyRouter keeps $0 of that fee. Polar may add sales tax on the card depending on your country — tax is extra on the card, not extra credits, and not AnyRouter revenue.

Worked example — you top up $10.00:

Purchased credits land in your top-up bucket and never expire — they stay on your balance until used, and are only spent after your monthly credits run out. Polar also emails a receipt to the checkout address (credits added, Polar processing fee, AnyRouter keeps $0). Turn billing emails off under Notifications.

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

Checking your balance

In the dashboard, the Credits page shows your monthly and top-up credits on separate cards, a combined summary (total balance, total spend, and today's cost), and a full transaction history.

Programmatically, check your balance 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,
  "used": 12.47,
  "today_cost": 0.42,
  "currency": "usd"
}

balance is the total (monthly_balance + topup_balance). monthly_balance is the AnyRouter-issued bucket spent first; topup_balance is your purchased bucket spent after.

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

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

Each transaction includes:

Usage in the response

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

{
  "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.

Configure

• Credits dashboard — view buckets, top up, and browse transaction history.
• Subscription — the monthly plan credit (Go, Pro, Pro+, or Max) is granted automatically on activation and each renewal (idempotent, so a retried payment never double-grants). It lands in your monthly-credits bucket.