Credits & billing

Two lanes

• Platform-funded: our credits, priced from the public catalog. Each call draws down your balance and is metered as cost_micro_usd.
• Pass-through (BYOK): your own provider key. The provider bills you directly, so these calls never draw credits; they are metered as estimated_cost_micro_usd for attribution only.

Which lane a model rides is decided per-provider by its waterfall: a deployment backed by one of your provider connections is pass-through; a platform-seeded deployment is platform-funded. Either way, zero markup.

Credits

A credit is the platform’s spendable unit, pegged at a flat one cent. It is what everything is priced in, so display, checkout, and spend never drift between dollars and tokens. Today a credit is simply a cent under a friendlier name: the only thing that draws credits is routed token usage, which stays zero margin (platform-funded calls draw credits at the provider’s catalog price, with nothing added on top).

You get credits two ways, both at one cent each. The Free plan refreshes a monthly allotment. A Pro plan grants a larger monthly allotment and unlocks the Pro features. One-off top-ups buy credits without a plan, at the same flat rate. There is no markup on routed tokens; any margin comes from plans, not from a credit spread.

A new organization starts with a welcome credit grant. Your balance is the credit granted minus your billable (platform-funded) spend; pass-through usage does not count against it. Balance, spend, adding credits, and auto-recharge live in the dashboard at Credits.

Provider accounts and rotation

You can connect more than one account for the same provider — two Anthropic keys, two OpenAI organizations — each under its own handle. They form a pool: the gateway serves your traffic on the first account in your order, and rotates to the next one when an account runs out of quota, or is rate-limited in a sustained way (a burst of throttles over fifteen minutes; a single throttle never rotates, because switching accounts busts the prompt cache you have built on the current one). Rotation is a verdict written from your own traffic every five minutes; a later successful key check re-admits the account.

Manage the pool on the Credits page: drag accounts to set the order, switch each account’s “rotate when out of quota” and “rotate on sustained rate limit” off to fail on it instead of spending on a sibling, and read every account’s usage on its own key. The same controls are one call for an agent holding your org key: GET /api/orgs/{org_id}/provider-connections/accounts/usage, POST /api/orgs/{org_id}/provider-connections/{provider}/accounts/{setup_alias}/routing, and POST /api/orgs/{org_id}/provider-connections/reorder.

Spend controls

Spend is bounded at three levels, all configured in the dashboard:

• Per-key limits: a daily platform-funded spend cap, a requests-per-minute ceiling, and a tokens-per-minute ceiling on each API key.
• Budgets: a spend ceiling scoped to the whole team, an API key, a model, an identity, or a routing pool, for a given month or as a recurring cap.
• Spend alerts: an email when monthly org spend or a budget crosses a threshold.

A key can read its own effective limits over the API. GET /api/gateway/keys/<api_key_id>/limits returns the three ceilings with platform defaults folded in; a null value means uncapped, and source is explicit when set on the key or default otherwise. Setting limits is an admin dashboard action.

curl "https://api-pr-1391.preview.experientiallabs.ai/api/gateway/keys/$API_KEY_ID/limits" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $EXPLABS_API_KEY"

When you run out

When your credit balance or a spend limit is exhausted, calls fail with 429 insufficient_quota; the message says which: a daily org or per-model cap, a budget, or your credits. It is not transient: retrying does not clear it.

How to recover

• Add credits or raise a limit in the dashboard (platform-funded lane).
• Or move the model to the pass-through lane by connecting a provider key.

The full error contract is in Errors.