# 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](/impressum) 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):

| Credits | Payment processing fee | LowRouter fee (1.5%) | Total before VAT |
|--------:|-----------------------:|---------------------:|-----------------:|
|   €5.00 |        €0.75 (minimum) |                €0.08 |            €5.83 |
|  €25.00 |            €2.00 (8%)  |                €0.38 |           €27.38 |
| €100.00 |            €8.00 (8%)  |                €1.50 |          €109.50 |

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](#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](/pricing).

## 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](pricing-and-fx)). 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](usage-accounting#cost-resolution-and-rounding).

## 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](/pricing) 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.