Billing

Top up via Stripe → balance sits in your wallet → each API call deducts its cost in real time. If your balance hits zero, calls return 402 insufficient_quota until you top up again.

#The pricing model

For each call, Brievio computes the user's cost as the larger of two numbers:

• Catalog cost — the displayed price on the model card (per 1M tokens, per image, per second of video, etc.) × the actual usage units.
• Upstream cost — what the upstream provider charged Brievio for the specific call, denominated in credits where 1 credit = $0.005.
• Markup factor — typically 1.5 (50% margin). For some China-provider models where the upstream wholesale is closer to the provider's official rate, the factor is reduced to 1.2 so we stay below official.

The max() ensures: (a) you never pay less than the advertised catalog price, and (b) we never lose money on a call where the upstream cost spikes unexpectedly.

#Billing units by modality

#Cached tokens

Chat models cache stable prompt prefixes. Cache reads bill well below the normal input rate — for the Claude family at 0.10×, for OpenAI and Gemini at 0.20×. Cache writes bill at the plain input rate; Brievio does not pass through Anthropic's upstream write surcharge. The max() floor above is computed cache-aware, so the discount reaches you instead of being flattened by the catalog price.

See the Prompt caching guide for the full pricing table, how to enable cache_control, and how Brievio's affinity routing keeps the cache warm.

#Precision

All amounts in Brievio are stored in micro_cents:

• 1 USD = 100,000,000 micro_cents
• 1 cent = 1,000,000 micro_cents
• Minimum resolvable charge: 0.0001 cent ($0.000001). Practical chat calls often bill at this floor.

Dashboard display rounds to 6 decimals (USD) for small values and 2 decimals once it crosses cents. Internal accounting is exact.

#Top-up

Fund your wallet at /app/billing via Stripe Checkout. Cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, and Stripe's local methods all work.

Tier pricing

#Webhook timing

After you complete Stripe Checkout, your balance updates via webhook. The webhook typically fires within 5–10 seconds of payment confirmation. For card payments this is near-instant; for async methods (ACH, SEPA) the deposit can take days to settle — but you'll see the order as pending the entire time.

#The credit ledger

Every balance change is recorded in an append-only ledger:

balance_after_micro_cents is stamped on each row, giving you a per-event snapshot. View the full history at /app/billing.

#Usage logs

Every API call gets a row in usage_logs:

• Model, status (success / error), HTTP status code
• Input / output tokens, cached + cache-write tokens, image count, seconds, characters
• upstream_cost_micro_cents — what Brievio paid the upstream
• cost_micro_cents — what you paid (after markup)
• Latency, request IP, user agent, API key prefix

Visible at /app/usage with filters and per-call detail pages.

#Failed calls — do they cost anything?

No. Brievio only bills on status = success. If the upstream returns 4xx / 5xx, or our task times out, the call is recorded but the cost is $0. We absorb the upstream cost ourselves rather than passing it through.

#Refunds

Refunds are case-by-case via support@brievio.com. Common cases we refund:

• Outage on Brievio's side that caused you to lose budget.
• Pricing bugs where you were overcharged vs the displayed catalog.
• Accidental double top-up via Stripe.

Refunds are issued as credit to your wallet by default; bank-account refunds via Stripe are also available on request.

#Where to go next

• Full pricing table with vs-official discounts
• Error codes (incl. quota)