Pay-as-you-go · No tiers, no seats, no contracts
Pricing that fits in one sentence
Every provider at its real metered price, one 5.5% fee when you add credits, and $5 free to start — that's the entire model.
$5 free at sign-up
Create an account and your balance starts at $5.00, with your first API key already minted. No card, no sales call — enough for thousands of real calls across the catalog.
Usage at provider prices
Each request debits the provider's own metered cost — what Serper, Firecrawl or ElevenLabs actually charged for that call. No per-call markup: the price you benchmark is the price you pay.
5.5% only when you top up
Our entire margin is one fee, added when you buy credits: adding $100 charges $105.50, and the full $100 lands in your balance. Itemized at checkout and on your Stripe receipt. No minimum fee, no monthly anything.
The math, in the open
The breakdown below uses the exact rounding the checkout uses — the number you see here is the number your card is charged.
Whole dollars, $10–$5,000 per purchase.
- Credits added to balance
- $25.00
- Service fee (5.5%)
- $1.38
- Your card is charged
- $26.38
| You buy | Fee (5.5%) | Card charged | Balance gets |
|---|---|---|---|
| $10 | $0.55 | $10.55 | $10.00 |
| $25 | $1.38 | $26.38 | $25.00 |
| $100 | $5.50 | $105.50 | $100.00 |
| $1,000 | $55.00 | $1,055.00 | $1,000.00 |
Credits are dollars — $1 buys $1.00 of balance. The fee rides on top; it is never deducted from what you receive. Auto-top-up uses the same 5.5%.
What the free $5 actually buys
Measured cost-per-call from our public benchmark runs — not list-price arithmetic.
Clean page scrapes
Firecrawl — $0.0021 per successful scrape, ranked #1 of 10 in our Scrape eval.
Same prices as going direct — minus the overhead
The catalog spans 24 providers. Here's what changes when you reach them through one key.
| Direct, per provider | Through auxiliar | |
|---|---|---|
| Accounts | Up to 24 sign-ups and onboardings | One |
| API keys to guard | Up to 24 secrets in your agent's reach | One — upstream keys stay server-side, injected per request |
| Billing | Up to 24 plans, invoices and credit systems | One dollar-denominated balance |
| Price per call | The provider's metered price | The same provider's metered price |
| Cost of an idle tool | Often a subscription floor or plan credits that expire | $0 — an unused provider costs nothing |
| What we charge | — | 5.5% when you top up. That's all. |
Why the fee sits on top-ups, not inside prices
A pricing model is a set of incentives. Here are ours.
Our rankings can't take a cut
We publish head-to-head evals for every provider we carry — quality, latency, cost. If our margin hid inside per-call prices, we'd earn more when you picked pricier tools, and you'd be right to doubt every ranking. A flat fee at top-up pays us the same 5.5% whether you route to the #1 tool or the #8. The benchmarks have nothing to sell you.
You can audit every number
The fee is its own line at checkout and on the Stripe receipt. Every request lands in your ledger with the provider's cost against it. And credits are just dollars — no invented points currency, no exchange rate to bury the math in.
The structure the ecosystem already trusts
It's the standard credit model of the AI ecosystem's largest gateways: provider prices passed through untouched, one small fee when you buy credits. We didn't invent a clever new fee — we adopted the shape developers already accept as fair, minus the minimum: 5.5% is the whole fee on a $10 top-up or a $5,000 one.
What the 5.5% pays for
Payment processing, the unified ledger and receipts, server-side custody of 24 upstream keys your agent never touches, monitoring and alerting on every provider, and the benchmark fleet that keeps the catalog honest. This fee is the whole business model — there's nothing else to find.
Questions people actually ask
Is usage marked up?
No. Each request debits the provider's real metered cost for that call — the same number you'd owe the provider directly. Our margin is not in the per-call price.
What does the 5.5% service fee apply to?
Credit purchases and auto-top-ups only. It's added on top at checkout — adding $100 charges $105.50 and the full $100.00 lands in your balance — and itemized as its own line on your Stripe receipt. It never applies per request, and never to the free $5 trial credit.
Do I need a card to try the gateway?
No. Your balance starts at $5.00 the first time you sign in, and your first API key is minted automatically. The card comes later, if and when you top up.
How much can I top up?
$10 to $5,000 per purchase, in whole dollars. Optional auto-top-up recharges your balance at the same 5.5% fee — there's no separate rate.
What happens when my balance hits zero?
Requests return HTTP 402 until you add credits. Enable auto-top-up in the dashboard if you never want an agent to stop mid-run.
How do I know what a call will cost before I make it?
Every provider page in the tools catalog publishes measured cost per call alongside quality and latency, and per-endpoint prices are in the docs. After the fact, your ledger shows the exact debit for every request.
Are credits refundable? Do they expire?
Credits are denominated in dollars and sit in your balance — there's no monthly cycle that resets them. They're non-refundable except where required by law; see the Terms of Service for the current policy.
Start with $5 on us
No card. Your first key is minted the moment you sign in — point any of the 24 tools' SDKs at api.auxiliar.ai and go.