Prepaid AI API credits that never expire: who offers them, and what to check
Prepaid AI API credit is convenient until it expires. Which APIs say their credit never expires, which reserve the right to expire it, and what else to check before you top up.
Prepaid credit is the simplest way to pay for AI APIs: top up once, spend it on whatever you call. The fine print is what happens to the credit you haven't spent — and what you paid on top to get it.
What the terms say
As each vendor's own pages stated it on November 4, 2026:
| Credit expiry | Fee on top of credit | |
|---|---|---|
| OpenRouter | "Reserves the right to expire unused credits" 365 days after purchase | 5.5% on credit purchases (Standard), 8% (Business) |
| kie.ai | "Credits never expire" | Credits priced per model |
| Requesty | Not stated on its pricing page | 5% markup on model cost |
| Inferray | Never expires | None |
Four things to check before you top up
- Does it expire? Look in the terms, not just the pricing page; "reserves the right" is still a right.
- What is charged on top? A fee on purchases or a markup on usage both raise the real price of every token.
- What is the model price? List price, so you can check it against the lab's own page, or a reseller's own number?
- What happens to a failed request? You should not pay for a request that returned nothing.
Inferray's answers
- Pay-as-you-go credit never expires.
- No gateway fee: a top-up credits exactly what you pay.
- Models are billed at their list price.
- A request that fails without a result is not billed; if it fails part-way, the tokens processed before the failure are.
| Model | Input / 1M | Cached / 1M | Output / 1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2 | $0.1 | $10 | 1M |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | $2 | $0.1 | $10 | 1.1M |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | $0.75 | $0.075 | $3.75 | 1.0M |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | $0.15 | $0.003 | $0.6 | 1M |
Prices on this page come from the model catalog and were current on November 12, 2026.