How pay-as-you-go billing works
FluxRouter meters you by the tokens you route, at the rate of the lane that served each request. Input and output tokens both count. No seats, no minimums.
FluxRouter is pay-as-you-go. You are billed for the tokens you actually route, at the rate of whichever pricing lane served the request. There is no per-seat fee and no minimum commitment to send a request.
How is a request priced?
Every request is metered by tokens, at the rate of the lane that served it:
| Lane | Rate | For |
|---|---|---|
| Express Lane | $1 / 1M tokens | Lightweight, high-volume, latency-sensitive work |
| Daily Driver | $2 / 1M tokens | General-purpose coding, writing, and analysis |
| Deep Thought | $4 / 1M tokens | The hardest reasoning and frontier-model work |
When you send a request to flux-auto, FluxRouter picks a model for it, and you pay that model's lane rate. When you pin a model with a tier alias or a flux-pinned-* id, you pay that model's lane rate. Either way, the price follows the model that served the request.
Do input and output tokens both count?
Yes. Both the input tokens (your prompt) and the output tokens (the model's response) are metered. Models price input and output separately, so a long prompt and a long completion are billed at their respective per-token rates within the lane.
You can see the cost of any single request in the X-Flux-Cost-Usd response header. See Reading your usage and invoices.
Are there seats or minimums?
No. Pay-as-you-go has no per-seat fee and no minimum spend to send a request. You pay only for what you route. This is true on the Free plan (within its monthly cap) and on the Pay As You Go plan, and it is also how usage above a paid plan's included credit is billed.
Why is this cheaper than going direct?
Because flux-auto right-sizes each request, simple prompts land on cheaper lanes and only the hard ones reach Deep Thought. A mixed workload pays a blended rate instead of a frontier rate on everything. You see exactly which model answered and what it cost on every response. See Routing & pricing.
What about plans with an included credit?
Paid plans bundle an included amount of routing each month and a higher spend ceiling. Usage up to the included credit is covered by the plan; usage above it bills at the same flat lane rates. The metering is identical to pay-as-you-go either way. See Plans and what's included.