Credits and billing

LowRouter is pre-paid. You top up a credit balance, the gateway debits that balance per request, and the balance is your single source of truth for spend.

Credits

A credit is a fractional unit of EUR: 1 credit = €0.01, so €5 of credits adds 500 credits. Credits and balances are always denominated in EUR, and checkout is in EUR.

Credits are valid for 12 months from purchase. Each credit line’s expiry date is shown on the dashboard, and spend always draws down the oldest credits first. Refunds for accidental top-ups are handled case-by-case via the support email on the legal page within 14 days.

The current balance is shown on the dashboard, on the credits page, and in the response of every request as usage.remaining_balance (with usage.currency) in the response body.

Top-up fees

Buying credits is where LowRouter’s fees live — there are exactly two, added to the credit amount at checkout:

• Payment processing fee — 8% of the credit amount, with a €0.75 minimum. It is flat for every payment method and region and covers card processing and the payment platform’s per-transaction costs. The minimum is what applies below ~€9.40 of credits.
• LowRouter fee — 1.5% of the credit amount. This is our margin.

Worked examples (before VAT):

The same breakdown, with the same labels, is itemized at checkout before you confirm. VAT is then added on top by Stripe based on your billing country (see Tax and invoices). Every euro of credit is yours to spend in full once delivered.

Self-serve top-ups start at €5. A new account can buy up to €100 per purchase; the cap rises automatically as your account builds purchase history. For volume beyond self-serve, contact support.

The one-page summary of the whole fee story, kept current, is the pricing page.

What a request costs

The cost of a request is:

upstream_provider_price_per_token × tokens

with the upstream price converted to EUR where the provider bills in another currency (daily rate plus a 1% conversion buffer — see pricing and currency conversion). There is no per-token markup: the EUR prices visible on the model browser and the model pages, quoted per 1M tokens separately for prompt and completion, are exactly what your balance is debited.

A few details worth knowing:

• Cached prompt tokens (when an upstream provider supports prompt caching) are charged at the upstream’s cached rate.
• Failed requests that produced no upstream charge consume zero credits. A 4xx from the upstream that did consume tokens (rare) is passed through to your bill.
• Streaming responses are charged on the same usage numbers as a non-streaming response — total tokens, not per-chunk.
• Per-request rounding: usage.cost is quantized to €0.000001 and rounded up — the full statement of the bound is in usage accounting.

Top up

Dashboard → Credits → Add credits, then complete the Stripe-hosted checkout. Card and SEPA Direct Debit (EU accounts) are supported.

The credit amount you select is exclusive of the top-up fees and VAT; the checkout itemizes all of it — credits, both fee components, and the total — before you pay.

Tax and invoices

Credit purchases are sold by Stripe as the seller of record (under Stripe Managed Payments). In practice:

• VAT is calculated and added at checkout by Stripe, at the rate of your billing country.
• EU businesses with a valid VAT number entered at checkout are reverse-charged — no VAT on the invoice, you self-account for it.
• The invoice is issued by Stripe, not by Carbonifer SAS, and names Stripe as the seller. It is emailed after every successful top-up and downloadable as PDF from Dashboard → Invoices.

If you operate on behalf of a company, set the legal name, billing address, and VAT number under Settings → Billing; invoices issued from that point onwards carry the company details. Past invoices can be re-issued with a corrected billing block on request via support.

LowRouter itself is operated by Carbonifer SAS, a French entity; Carbonifer runs the service, Stripe sells the credits and owns the VAT and invoicing obligations that come with the sale.

Pricing changes

Upstream provider prices change. We update the prices on the model browser and in the routing engine within one business day of an upstream price change going live. The dashboard records the per-request price at the moment of the request, so historical bills are stable even when current prices change.

Material changes to the top-up fees are announced at least 30 days in advance to the email on the account, and the pricing page always carries the current numbers.

What we don’t bill for

• Failed authentication, rate-limited requests, or key-limit hits — zero credits.
• Health checks (HEAD /docs, HEAD /v1/models, etc.) — zero credits.
• Dashboard browsing, key management, or any control-plane action — zero credits.

Refunds

Refunds for unspent credit balances are not processed automatically. Contact support if you need to wind down an account; we’ll process the refund of the remaining balance to the original payment method, subject to a 14-day cooling-off limit on the most recent top-up under EU consumer law.