Credits and billing

Tovano is prepaid. You buy credits in US dollars, and every call draws down your balance at the model's public price.

Units and prices

Each model has one unit and one price per unit:

Unit	Example
`image`	$0.020 per image
`second`	$0.100 per second of video
`minute`	per minute of audio (coming models)
`1k_chars`	$0.030 per 1,000 characters of speech
`1m_input_tokens`, `1m_output_tokens`	$1.00 and $4.00 per 1M tokens

All amounts in the API are integers in micro-dollars, in fields that end in _micro. 1000000 is $1.00. There are no floats.

How a charge works

Reserve. When a task starts, we hold the estimated charge on your balance.
Settle. When it finishes, we charge the real amount and release the rest.
Release. If it fails, we release everything. A failed task is never charged.

Each change to your balance is one row in the ledger: topup, charge, refund, grant or adjustment. See it under Billing.

Check your balance

curl https://api.tovano.ai/v1/balance -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOVANO_API_KEY"

{ "balance_micro": 2539815213, "currency": "usd" }

Out of credits

When the balance is too low for a request, the API returns 402:

{
  "error": {
    "type": "billing_error",
    "code": "insufficient_credits",
    "message": "Your balance is too low for this request."
  }
}

Limits and alerts

Set these under Billing:

Setting	What it does
Monthly spend limit	Calls stop with `402` when the month's spend would pass it
Low-balance alert	An email when the balance drops below the amount
Auto top-up	Adds a fixed amount by card when the balance drops below a threshold

Volume bonus

Larger top-ups add bonus credits, written to the ledger as a separate grant row.

Top-up	Bonus credits
$1,000 – $2,499	2%
$2,500 – $9,999	5%
$10,000 and up	8%

Volume pricing

High-volume teams can agree committed-volume prices, payment by invoice and an uptime SLA. Write to sales@tovano.ai.

Cost per customer

Send your own customer ID with each call, in the customer field or the X-Tovano-Customer header. Then group usage by it:

curl "https://api.tovano.ai/v1/usage?group_by=customer" -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOVANO_API_KEY"

Invoices

Every top-up gets a receipt. At the end of each month you get one invoice listing usage per model, paid from credits. Add your company name, address and VAT ID under Billing so they appear on it.