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.
Every request through an LLM gateway clears four independent gates before a provider ever sees it — credit balance, budget cap, RPM/TPM rate limit, and guardrails. Each has its own status code, its own scope, and its own fix.
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 two breakevens that decide which nRouter plan is the cheapest option on your invoice. Pro's flat fee is a strategy, not a discount — the volume that makes it sustainable funds the provider reservations that compound the next savings round.
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.
