How billing works
Exactly what a request costs, down to the kobo.
You pay in Naira, in advance, and each request deducts its cost from your balance. There's no subscription and no expiry.
What a request costs
A response reports four kinds of tokens, each priced differently:
- Input: new tokens you sent.
- Cache read: tokens served from the prompt cache. Much cheaper than input.
- Cache write: tokens saved to the cache. Slightly more than input, paid once.
- Output: tokens Claude wrote, including thinking tokens.
The cost is each count times that model's rate for it, from the pricing table.
Worked example (Claude Sonnet 5.5)
| Tokens | Count | Rate / 1M | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input | 1,000 | ₦3,680.00 | ₦3.6800 |
| Cache read | 5,000 | ₦184.00 | ₦0.9200 |
| Cache write | 200 | ₦4,600.00 | ₦0.9200 |
| Output | 300 | ₦18,400.00 | ₦5.5200 |
| Total | ₦11.0400 | ||
Your Usage page shows this for every request.
Other charges
- Web search: $0.01 per search (₦18.40) on top of tokens.
- Everything else is token-based. Rejected requests and upstream errors are never billed.
Top-ups
- Minimum ₦5,000. Pay by card, bank transfer or USSD.
- The full amount you pay is added to your balance.
- Every top-up has a printable receipt under Billing, with your business name if you add one in Settings.
When your balance runs out
Requests return 402 billing_error until you top up. Requests that were already running when the balance ran out still finish and are charged, so a balance can dip slightly below zero. The next top-up simply settles it.
Cancelled requests
If you cancel a streaming request, you're billed for the tokens generated up to that point. Anthropic bills us for them, so we pass that through.
Questions about a charge? Email support@gethephaestus.com with the request-id.