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
LowRouter’s fees are charged when you buy credits: a single fee added to the credit amount at checkout. Which rate applies depends on your billing situation, never on your card or payment method:
- Business: 5.5% + €0.30 per top-up. Businesses with a verified EU VAT number. Add your VAT number under Tax details on the credits page, or at checkout, before you top up. Reverse charge applies, no VAT.
- Standard: 6.5% + €0.30 per top-up. Individuals and businesses without a verified VAT number, EU/EEA. VAT added at checkout.
- International: 8.5% + €0.30 per top-up. Billing address outside the EU/EEA. Charged in euros. Local tax added where applicable.
The business rate reflects our cost, and is not a discount: our payment partner charges its fees on the VAT-inclusive total, so a reverse-charged purchase costs us less to process.
Worked examples, total before VAT:
| Credits | Business (5.5%) | Standard (6.5%) | International (8.5%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| €5.00 | €5.58 | €5.63 | €5.73 |
| €25.00 | €26.68 | €26.93 | €27.43 |
| €100.00 | €105.80 | €106.80 | €108.80 |
The fee, with the same label, is itemized at checkout before you confirm. VAT is then added on top by Stripe based on your billing country (see Tax and invoices), except on the business tier where reverse charge means there is none to add. Every euro of credit is yours to spend in full once delivered.
Stripe verifies your VAT number against the EU’s VIES service; we never query it ourselves. Verification is not instant, so add your number before you top up; until it comes back you are charged the standard rate. If a number cannot be verified you stay on the standard rate and we tell you why.
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.
We’re actively working with our payment partners to bring these fees down.
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 × tokenswith 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.
Some details:
- 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.costis quantized to €0.000001 and rounded up. The full statement of the bound is in usage accounting.
Top up
Open the credits page and choose 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 the 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: there is no VAT on the invoice, and 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 the Invoices page.
If you operate on behalf of a company, set your VAT number and billing country under Tax details on the credits page before you buy. Those decide your fee tier and your VAT treatment. The legal name and billing address come from what you enter at Stripe’s checkout; the credits page shows them back to you once your first purchase has recorded them. 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 cost zero credits. A request that never reaches a provider never costs anything, however many times you retry it.
- Requests rejected before routing (an unknown model ID, a malformed body, a region the model isn’t served in) cost zero credits.
- Dashboard browsing, key management, or any control-plane action costs 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.