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ARouter uses a prepaid credit system. You add credits to your account, then ARouter deducts usage costs as requests complete. Inference pricing itself follows the upstream provider’s model pricing. ARouter applies the same billing rules and operational policies described here for credit purchases, refunds, BYOK usage, and balance handling.

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How Billing Works

When you make a request, ARouter receives the final usage totals from the provider and calculates the corresponding charge from your credit balance. Each request can include:
  • Input tokens: Tokens in your prompt or messages
  • Output tokens: Tokens generated by the model
  • Cached tokens: Tokens served from prompt cache when supported
  • Reasoning, image, or audio tokens: Additional usage categories returned by the model
{
  "usage": {
    "prompt_tokens": 500,
    "completion_tokens": 200,
    "total_tokens": 700,
    "prompt_tokens_details": {
      "cached_tokens": 400,
      "cache_write_tokens": 100
    }
  }
}
In this example:
  • 400 tokens were served from cache at the cached token rate
  • 100 tokens were written to cache at the standard input rate
  • 200 output tokens were billed at the output token rate

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Pricing and Fees

ARouter passes through provider inference pricing without markup. When you purchase credits, a platform fee is charged on top of the credit amount. Crypto top-ups may use a different fee schedule than card payments. If you use Bring Your Own Key (BYOK), a free monthly allowance is available first, and usage beyond that allowance incurs a small ARouter platform fee while provider-side inference is billed through your own key.

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Credit Expiry and Refunds

Unused credits may expire one year after purchase in accordance with the billing terms. Refunds for unused credits can be requested within 24 hours of purchase. After that window, unused credits become non-refundable. Platform fees are non-refundable, and crypto payments are not refundable. If a purchase does not appear in your balance immediately, allow some time for the payment provider to settle. If the charge completed but the credits still do not appear, contact support through the Dashboard with the purchase details.

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Checking Your Balance

Use the balance endpoint to query your account’s current credit balance: 
GET /api/v1/balance

curl https://api.arouter.ai/api/v1/balance \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer lr_live_xxxx"
Response: 
{
  "balance": 42.50,
  "currency": "USD"
}
The balance field represents your remaining credits in USD.

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Transaction History

Query your full transaction history: 
GET /api/v1/transactions

curl https://api.arouter.ai/api/v1/transactions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer lr_live_xxxx"
Response: 
{
  "transactions": [
    {
      "id": "txn_xxx",
      "type": "usage",
      "amount": -0.0042,
      "description": "openai/gpt-5.4 — 500 input tokens, 200 output tokens",
      "created_at": "2026-04-03T10:00:00Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "txn_yyy",
      "type": "credit",
      "amount": 50.00,
      "description": "Credit purchase",
      "created_at": "2026-04-01T09:00:00Z"
    }
  ]
}

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Monitoring Usage

You can also review balance, credit activity, and request-level spend in the Dashboard:
  • Real-time credit balance
  • Per-request usage breakdown
  • Historical spending by model and provider

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Purchasing Credits

Credits can be purchased through the Dashboard at https://api.arouter.ai/billing. ARouter also supports on-chain credit top-ups via the x402 payment protocol for crypto-native workflows. See the x402 Payments Guide for setup instructions.

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Payment Methods

ARouter supports card-based credit purchases in the Dashboard and crypto-native top-ups for supported payment flows. Available methods may expand over time.

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Free Usage and Limits

If your account includes a free allowance or promotional credits, those requests still count toward account-level rate limits and plan limits. Free usage is best suited for testing rather than production traffic.