Pricing and currency conversion

Most providers we route to publish their per-token prices in USD rather than EUR. To keep accounting and balances simple, every balance and every charge is in EUR, and we convert non-EUR provider prices to EUR once a day before they reach the catalogue.

This page explains how that conversion works, why the displayed price on a USD-billed provider isn’t quite the same as the headline USD figure, and what happens when our FX feed is unavailable.

How the conversion is computed

For each non-EUR provider price we ingest, the stored EUR value is:

stored_eur_per_1m_tokens =
    source_per_1m_tokens
    × max(source_to_eur_rate, 1.0)
    × (1 + fx_buffer_percent / 100)

• source_per_1m_tokens — the price the provider publishes in their billing currency (USD for most providers).
• source_to_eur_rate — the daily rate that converts the provider’s currency into EUR, derived from the reference rates published by the European Central Bank at the eurofxref-daily.xml endpoint. A rate floor of 1.0 is applied: when the EUR is stronger than the source currency, the floor pins the conversion at parity so that a strong EUR can’t quietly erode our markup.
• fx_buffer_percent — a fixed conversion markup applied on top of the ECB rate, defaulting to 3 %. The markup covers FX-spread drift between the day we fetched the rate and the day we settle with the provider, plus payment-rail conversion fees.

For example, a provider publishing $0.15 per 1M tokens at an ECB reference rate of 1 EUR = 0.90 USD (so 1 USD = 1.111 EUR) and a 3 % markup becomes:

0.15 × 1.111 × 1.03 ≈ 0.1717 EUR per 1M tokens

When the EUR is instead stronger than the dollar — say 1 EUR = 1.085 USD, so 1 USD = 0.92 EUR, which is below the 1.0 floor — the floor kicks in and the conversion uses 1.0:

0.15 × 1.0 × 1.03 ≈ 0.1545 EUR per 1M tokens

That is what your balance is debited for every 1M tokens you spend on that model.

Where you see the dual figures

Providers that already bill in EUR (e.g. /providers/scaleway) render a single figure: their published EUR price, shown as-is with no conversion. Providers that bill in USD (most of them — OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Vertex, Groq, …) render both numbers:

$0.15/M (€0.17 billed)

The first figure is the upstream price you’d see on the provider’s own pricing page. The second is the EUR value your balance is debited at, computed with the formula above. Hovering the price shows the ECB rate, the markup, and when the conversion was last refreshed.

Refresh cadence

The ECB feed updates on TARGET business days at ~16:00 CET. We pull it once per ingest run, which runs daily. Saturday and Sunday reuse Friday’s published rate — that’s the standard ECB convention.

Your debit at request time uses the most recent stored EUR value. This means the price you see in the catalogue today may differ slightly from what was billed yesterday for the same number of tokens — by the size of the FX move plus markup drift.

When the ECB feed is unavailable

If we cannot reach ECB during an ingest run, we soft-disable the affected providers (the USD-billed ones that need conversion) until the feed recovers. While soft-disabled, those providers are visible in the catalogue but won’t accept new requests, and an internal alert (FX_INGEST_STALE) notifies the team.

We deliberately do not fall back to a hard-coded rate. A guessed rate is worse than visible unavailability — it can either silently under-charge our margin or over-charge customers, and neither is something we want to do quietly.

What we don’t claim

• We don’t offer a rate lock. The price you see today is the price we charge today; tomorrow’s rate may differ. If you need a fixed price, the model’s EUR figure is the one we honour at the moment of the request, not a quote held in advance.
• We don’t pass through every provider price change in real time. The catalogue reflects the most recent successful ingest, which is daily. A provider price change mid-day will land in the next run.
• We don’t bill in any currency other than EUR. EUR is our single operating currency: balances, charges, the price list, and checkout are all EUR. Providers that publish in USD are converted once a day as described above, which keeps a single ledger and a single set of accounting rules.

Configuration

For self-hosted operators, the conversion markup can be tuned via the LOWROUTER_FX_BUFFER_PERCENT environment variable (default 3.0, clamped to [0, 20]). The change takes effect on the next ingest run.