Prices and charges

The rule

Each model costs a fixed fraction of the official price of its maker, for each token. Input, output, cached input and cache writes use the same fraction. If a maker charges more for a long prompt, our price for that prompt changes by the same step. You pay for the tokens that you send and the tokens that the model returns, counted on your request.

GET /v1/models gives our price for each million tokens, the official price (pricing.list) and the fraction (pricing.multiple_of_list). It needs no key. It is always correct for the figures on this page.

The table shows the frontier models first. The open models (Kimi, GLM, Qwen and MiniMax) come after them. Each open model has its own multiple, and it is smaller than the frontier multiple.

To check an official price, open the price page of the maker: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Moonshot AI, Z.ai, Qwen and MiniMax.

The cost on each response

A response without a stream has a kontinent block:

Field	What it is
cost_micros	The cost in micro-dollars. One micro-dollar is $0.000001. This is the amount that we take from your balance. Add these values to get an exact total
cost_usd	The same cost in US dollars
list_price_usd	The cost of the same tokens at the official price
saved_usd	list_price_usd minus cost_usd

A chat completions stream has the block on its usage frame. A Messages stream and a Responses stream do not have the block. See Supported endpoints. The “Saved this month” figure on the dashboard is the sum of the savings of your requests.

Your balance

The balance is in US dollars, and it does not expire. There is no subscription and no minimum monthly payment.

A new account gets a starter balance of $0.02. Until you add balance, you can use it on these models only: claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 (/v1/messages, /v1/chat/completions); gemini-3.5-flash (/v1/chat/completions).

To get more balance, top up on the balance page, in US dollars or in your own currency. A top-up starts at $1 by mobile money or bank transfer, and at $3 by card. You can also enter a redemption code there. The balance page also shows each charge.

How we charge a request

Before a request starts, we do not know how long the answer will be. Thus, we use three steps:

1. Hold. We hold the maximum cost from your balance. The maximum cost uses all of your max_tokens as output. If your balance is too low, you get a 402 error, and the request does not start.
2. Run. The model answers.
3. Charge. The model gives the real token counts. We charge for those tokens and give back the rest of the amount that we held.

As a result:

• An amount that we hold during a request is not a charge. Most of it comes back.
• If the request fails, all of the amount comes back. A failed request costs no money.
• We charge on the token counts of the model, not on our estimate.

How we round a charge

We round each charge up to the next micro-dollar.

Thought tokens

Some models think before they answer. We charge for that output as output tokens, but the response does not show it. On a short answer, this can be most of the cost. In GET /v1/models, these models have "reasoning": true.

Streams

A stream costs the same as the same request without a stream. If you close the connection, we charge for the output that the model wrote. See Streams.

What we do not do

• We do not use monthly plans, seats or tiers.
• We do not charge for a failed request.
• We do not change a price without notice. We write each price change in the changelog. A price change does not change the value of a balance that you have.