Your balance is not a stored number, it is the sum of a ledger. Here is how to read the four numbers on the balance card, the entry types behind them, and the two identities that prove your balance is doing what it should.
Prepaid tokens are one provider's currency, priced against one rate card. Gateway credits are dollars that fund any model behind one key. Here is how to consolidate, read the balance card, and prove each call settled at real cost.
Auto top-up keeps your balance from hitting zero mid-traffic, but on its own it removes the only thing that stops a runaway. Here is the three-number configuration — threshold, top-up amount, and a Block-mode budget — that makes it safe.
Checking a balance and then calling a provider is a race, and under the fan-out an LLM gateway is built for it loses. Here is the reserve, settle and release contract as you can observe it — what your balance does on success, on an upstream failure, on a timeout, and when the cost is never knowable.
The most important number in an LLM gateway is what a call cost, and it is the easiest one to fudge. We read the provider's settled cost and pass it through exactly; when it is unknowable we say unpriced, never zero.
Bring-your-own-key sounds customer-friendly and mostly relocates work to you. nRouter issues one key and credits and manages every provider account — here is the reasoning, the blast-radius math, what the choice costs you, and who should pick a BYOK gateway instead.
Image, video and audio models price per image, per second and per minute, not per token — and the expensive ones are the newest ones. nRouter holds a modality-appropriate reservation before the call and reports an unknowable cost as unpriced, never as zero.
If you resell AI, the model bill is the wrong unit. Attribute every call to the customer it served with the OpenAI user field, cap each customer independently, and reconcile the sum against your ledger to the cent.
Provider pricing does not normalize on its own — per-token, per-image, per-second, provisioned. Here is how nRouter turns that into one settled cost per request that your app, your ledger and your dashboard all read, and why an unknown cost is reported as absent rather than as zero.
