Pay as you go or a subscription: which LLM gateway plan is cheaper?

Updated 2026-10-10: nRouter sells one plan, pay as you go, at a 0% platform fee. No subscription plan is sold (existing subscribers keep theirs).

The Direct Answer: nRouter sells ONE plan, pay as you go, at a 0% platform fee. A credit purchase charges exactly the credits bought ($5 costs $5.00, $100 costs $100.00), nRouter absorbs card-processing costs, and usage settles at the served model's exact list price (0% markup). No subscription plan is sold (existing subscribers keep theirs). For grandfathered subscribers, Starter ($20/mo), Pro ($50/mo), and Max ($200/mo) retain monthly allowances for smart model routing ($60/mo allowance on Starter, $100/mo on Pro, $400/mo on Max) alongside scaled throughput ceilings. If your traffic uses named models, Pay-As-You-Go with zero fees is mathematically direct.

Figure 1: Plan Economics Comparison — The 0% platform fee on pay as you go, paired with included smart-routing allowances on grandfathered subscription tiers.

The fee does not decide it. nRouter charges a 0% platform fee on credit purchases: $5 costs $5.00, $100 costs $100.00, with card-processing costs absorbed. No subscription plan is sold; existing subscribers keep their monthly nrouter/auto allowance — Starter $20/mo includes $60 a month of nrouter/auto usage, Pro $50 includes $100, Max $200 includes $400, at list rate — and their throughput ceilings.

Every LLM-gateway pricing page has the same shape: a pay-as-you-go plan with a percentage fee, a few paid plans with a monthly price, and a "contact sales" door. The reflex is to look for the spend level where a subscription "pays for itself" by removing the fee. On nRouter that line does not exist, and it is worth knowing why before you go looking for it.

This post answers the reader question: pay as you go or a subscription — which is cheaper? The honest answer is simple: nRouter sells one plan, pay as you go, at a 0% platform fee. No subscription plan is sold to new customers (existing subscribers keep theirs). On pay as you go, a credit purchase charges exactly the credits bought ($5 costs $5.00, $100 costs $100.00) and settles at list rate. For teams holding a grandfathered subscription, what remains is the monthly usage allowance for nrouter/auto — the model name that tells nRouter to pick the model for you — and throughput ceilings. If you do not send traffic to nrouter/auto, pay as you go is the cheaper path, full stop.

Five-minute path: the plans in one table, what a subscription buys, the worked example.

The plans in one table

Source of truth is the pricing page. nRouter sells one plan, pay as you go, at a 0% platform fee; no subscription plan is sold (existing subscribers keep theirs).

The subscriptions are monthly only. The current rate-limit numbers for each plan are on /pricing; this post does not restate them, because a limit copied into a blog post is a limit that drifts.

The feature set is identical across every row. No plan unlocks guardrails, A/B routing, prompt management, evals, per-team budgets, multi-tenancy or virtual keys — those ship on pay as you go the moment you sign up. The reasoning is in every feature on every plan. What varies is exactly two things: the monthly nrouter/auto allowance and the rate limits. The fee is not on that list.

Zero platform fee on credit purchases

nRouter charges a 0% platform fee on credits. A credit purchase charges exactly the credits bought, card-processing costs are absorbed, and usage settles at the served model's exact list price (0% markup). That makes the arithmetic exact:

charge = credits × 1.00

$5 of credits    →  $5.00 charged   (the $5 minimum)
$100 of credits  →  $100.00 charged
$800 of credits  →  $800.00 charged

Credit purchases pay a 0% fee across the board. No subscription plan is sold to new customers, so there is no subscription tier to buy down fees. Usage settles at the served model's exact list price with zero markup, as detailed in markup-free LLM credits. That exact list price is the baseline every LLM cost optimization strategy builds on — routing, caching and budgets only compound when the underlying rate is honest.

If you arrived here from an older link, this is what changed:

Legacy subscription tiers are no longer sold to new customers. Credit top-ups charge exact face value with 0% platform fee, and usage settles at list price.

What a subscription buys

A subscription includes a monthly usage allowance, and the allowance applies to one model name only: nrouter/auto. When a request sends model: "nrouter/auto", nRouter picks the model that serves it, and that usage counts against the allowance, measured at list rate. When a request names a model itself, it is paid from pay-as-you-go credits at list rate, with a 0% platform fee on credit purchases — on pay as you go and grandfathered subscription accounts alike.

Two requests, side by side:

# Counts against a subscription's monthly nrouter/auto allowance
curl https://api.nrouter.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model": "nrouter/auto", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Summarize this ticket."}]}'

# Names a model: paid from credits at list rate on every plan
curl https://api.nrouter.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model": "<a model id from /models>", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Summarize this ticket."}]}'

The allowance relative to the price, per plan:

It is a usage allowance, not a credit balance: it covers nrouter/auto requests and nothing else, and it never turns into credits for a named model. The trade you are making is control for price — you stop choosing the model for that slice of traffic. For which tasks tolerate that and which do not, see cost-vs-quality LLM routing.

When the allowance makes a grandfathered subscription cheaper

Because credits carry a 0% platform fee on every tier, the comparison reduces to one question: would a subscription price buy you more nrouter/auto usage than the same money spent directly as credits? Three steps:

1. Split your traffic. Mark each workload as pinned (it must run on a specific model — a production feature, an eval baseline, a regulated flow) or flexible (you are content for nRouter to choose — summaries, triage, drafts, internal tools).
2. Price the flexible slice at list rate. Take last month's usage for those workloads from your spend ledger — reading a credit ledger shows where the per-request cost sits — and total it.
3. Compare against the plan price. Pinned traffic costs the same on every plan, so ignore it. If the flexible slice at list rate is worth more than the plan's price and fits inside its allowance, the subscription is cheaper.

The reference points, all from the table above:

Read the table as a ceiling, not a promise. It assumes the flexible slice is worth the same at list rate whichever model serves it, and it assumes the usage stays inside the allowance. If your flexible slice is small — a few dollars a month — pay as you go is cheaper, because even Starter's $20 is more than the credits you would have bought.

Worked example — one team, four plans

A real-shaped scenario, anonymized as acct_b3c1. A product team spends $800/month at list rate on pinned traffic: a customer-facing feature that must run on the model it was evaluated against. It also runs an internal ticket-triage job that does not care which model answers, worth about $50/month at list rate.

The pinned traffic costs the same on every plan:

• $800 of credits at 0% platform fee: $800.00/month
• Platform fee inside that: $0.00, identical on pay as you go, Starter, Pro and Max

The whole bill, plan by plan:

For this team holding a grandfathered Starter plan, Starter is $30/month under pay as you go ($820 vs $850), because the triage job fits inside its $60 allowance. Pro buys allowance headroom it does not use, and is worth it only if the team needs the rate limits that come with it — compare them on /pricing. Max costs more than every other option at this volume.

Three things this example does not claim:

1. It does not lower the fee. The 0% platform fee on the pinned $800 is identical across all four rows ($0 fee). The saving comes entirely from moving the triage job into the allowance.
2. It does not assume the triage job gets the same model. On nrouter/auto nRouter picks the model; the comparison holds only if the team is content with that for triage. If it is not, the triage job is pinned traffic and pay as you go wins.
3. It reflects published terms. Prices and allowances are published contracts. The spend-reduction levers that sit outside plan choice are in cutting LLM costs.

When to stay on pay as you go — three operational guards

We would rather you stay on pay as you go than subscribe against the wrong shape. Three cases where a subscription is the wrong choice even when the worked example above looks like yours:

1. Everything you send is pinned. If every workload names its model — an agent pipeline that picks a model per step, a product feature under an eval, a regulated flow — the allowance covers none of it. You would pay a subscription price on top of credits that already carry a 0% platform fee. Stay on pay as you go and put the controls in credits, budgets, rate limits, guardrails instead.

2. Your flexible slice is spiky. If the triage-style workload was worth $10 one month and $90 the next, the average can clear Starter's $20 while the trough does not. Measure a few months first; the plan is monthly, so the decision is easy to revisit.

3. You are buying for rate limits you have not hit. Higher limits are the other thing a subscription buys, and they are worth paying for only once you are actually meeting a limit. Budgets and rate limits solve different problems — budgets vs rate limits covers which one you are short of — and the per-key mechanics are in RPM and TPM rate limiting.

   It is also worth being precise about how billing and cancellations work. On nRouter, no subscription plan is sold to new customers (existing subscribers keep theirs). For grandfathered subscriptions, cancelling stops future invoices rather than unwinding past ones; refunds are issued only by a Super Admin after review. Credit purchases on pay as you go charge exactly the credits bought ($5 costs $5.00, $100 costs $100.00) with a 0% platform fee.

If none of those three guards trip, the math is clear. The signup form is app.nrouter.ai/signup; plans are on /pricing.

Switching cost: one model string

For existing teams on a grandfathered plan, switching traffic is a routing change, not an integration change. Same base URL, same API keys, same SDK, same routing config. The two-line OpenAI / Anthropic SDK diff covered in the buyer's guide is migration into nRouter from another gateway; new signups onboard directly to pay as you go.

The one change that decides whether a grandfathered subscription saves money is in your request: the flexible workloads must send model: "nrouter/auto". A team that keeps naming models in every request never draws against its allowance. So the setup has two steps:

1. Review your plan on /pricing.
2. Send model: "nrouter/auto" for flexible workloads only, and leave the pinned ones exactly as they are.

The 90-second decision

Three numbers from your own ledger:

1. Last month's pinned spend. Everything that must run on a named model. This costs the same on every plan, so it only tells you what you will pay regardless.
2. Last month's flexible spend at list rate. Everything you would let nRouter route.
3. Compare the flexible figure with the plan table above.

If you are signing up today: pay as you go at a 0% platform fee is the plan, with no subscriptions sold.

For existing subscribers: if the flexible figure is under $20/month, pay as you go is cheaper. If it is between $20 and $60/month, grandfathered Starter covers it for $20, provided you are content for nRouter to pick the model for that slice. If it is above $60/month, grandfathered Pro ($100 allowance for $50) and Max ($400 allowance for $200) provide allowances against list-price credit spend. Enterprise is the conversation when you need custom terms — contact sales.

If you would rather we run the exercise against your invoices, that is what the 30-minute walk-through on /community is for — bring the last 90 days.

Try it on your own numbers

Before committing to paid credits, eligible new accounts can receive $100 in promotional credits after email and phone verification, without a card. Promotional access has a restricted model set and spending limits; see current pricing and promotion terms.

Pay as you go from $5 at a 0% platform fee ($5 charges exactly $5.00). A card is required, the $5 minimum is a real charge, and promotional access has separate limits. That is enough to exercise routing, guardrails, A/B tests and per-team budgets on real traffic, with card processing absorbed.

→ Get started at app.nrouter.ai/signup — Pay as you go from $5 at a 0% platform fee. No subscription plan is sold. Mid-market SaaS or larger? Bring 90 days of invoices to a 30-min walk-through (book through /community).

See also

• OpenRouter alternative: every enterprise LLM-gateway feature, on every plan — how nRouter's 0% platform fee compares with a flat card-purchase fee on another gateway.
• Cutting LLM costs: what published discounts actually save, and where the model is an assumption — the spend-reduction levers to pull before you change plan, separated into published discounts and assumptions.
• LLM gateway buyer's guide 2026 — the buyer-stage taxonomy, including where plan choice sits in the decision.
• Credits, budgets, rate limits, guardrails: four pre-flight gates — the controls that keep a plan change from turning into a surprise bill.
• How to read your LLM credit ledger — how to split last month's spend into pinned and flexible slices before you choose.
• Every Feature on Every Plan: No Fee, No Gate — why a plan changes the allowance and the rate limits, and nothing else.
• /pricing — the canonical plan table these figures come from.

Sources

Verified 2026-10-10. If a linked page has moved or changed a number since, email hello@nrouter.ai and we will re-audit and re-date this section.

Provider list rates — the published per-token prices that credits and the nrouter/auto allowance are measured against, which belong to each provider and not to nRouter:

• Anthropic API pricing: claude.com/pricing
• Azure OpenAI Service pricing: azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/azure-openai/
• AWS Bedrock pricing: aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/

Payment mechanics — cited for the third operational guard, where the difference between ending a subscription and getting money back matters:

• Stripe — cancelling a subscription: docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/cancel — cancellation stops future invoices; it does not reverse settled ones.
• Stripe — refunds: docs.stripe.com/refunds — a refund is a reversal issued against an existing charge, with its own lifecycle and its own timing.

nRouter's own plan figures come from /pricing, which is authoritative over any number restated here. Anthropic, Microsoft, AWS and Stripe are trademarks of their respective owners; nRouter is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.