What AI-Pay is
AI-Pay is a shared wallet and metering gateway for AI apps: a user keeps one balance of AI credit in AI-Pay and authorizes several apps to use AI within spending limits the user sets; AI-Pay meters every AI request, settles it against the user's wallet and issues a receipt. Developers never touch payments, never hold model keys and never front the cost of models for their users.
| Role | What you do in AI-Pay | Who pays |
|---|---|---|
| User | Sign in, check your AI credit, authorize apps with per-request / daily / monthly limits, read every receipt, pause or revoke an authorization at any time. | The user pays for model usage with their own AI credit. |
| Developer | Create an app, wire up "Sign in with AI-Pay", call models with the user's authorization, reconcile every request in the Console. | Your app has no model bill. Charging users an app service fee through AI-Pay is not open yet. |
Current stage: invitation-only Beta. Only invited users may test the service; public registration is not open. Features may fail, service may be interrupted, and data may be lost. Avoid uploading sensitive or important data, keep your own backups and understand the risks before use. Production does not accept top-ups at the moment. See the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
What is open today
All available features below are limited to invited users and require the relevant authorization. Test credit depends on the invitation. Details follow the developer docs and the screens of each environment.
| Feature | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Account sign-up (Beta) | Invited users only | First speak with your inviter and confirm that you understand the testing limitations and data risks. Then sign in and create your account as instructed in your invitation. Invitation eligibility applies on the AI-Pay site and through an app's "Sign in with AI-Pay". No public testing seats are open. |
| Test credit | As specified in the invitation | Credit follows the invitation and normally arrives during sign-in; if not, the system retries automatically for up to about a day. What the credit pays for and when it can be taken back are under How fees are calculated. |
| Sign in with AI-Pay (sign-in connection) | Open | Standard OAuth 2.0 authorization code + PKCE, public client, no client secret. Requesting only identity scopes is a plain sign-in with no spending screen. |
| AI credit authorization (calling models with the user's credit) | Open | After the user sets limits on the consent screen, the app calls POST /v1/chat/completions with ai.chat.create + wallet.charge; every successful response carries a receipt. |
| OpenAI compatibility | Limited subset | Text Chat Completions only: the body accepts model / messages / max_tokens / stream, any other field is rejected, and Idempotency-Key is required. This is not full OpenAI API compatibility. |
| Model catalog | Open | Text-only models, mostly routed through OpenRouter; the live list, count and prices are on Models & pricing (the catalog changes as upstream models come and go and reprice, so this page does not hard-code a count). Being listed does not guarantee that the upstream succeeds every time. |
| Top-ups (Stripe / PayPal) | Not open in production | Production does not accept top-ups at the moment; payments in test environments run in test mode and never charge real money. Once open, the payment total includes the processing fee and is not the AI credit that lands in the wallet. |
| App service fees and payouts | Not open | The code supports a per-request fee and a usage markup, but no app fee is charged to users today, and payout account setup and payout requests are not accepted; no opening date is set. |
| Live (real-time voice) | Not open | The code is merged, but production does not enable it and the public developer docs do not cover it yet. SDK 0.4.0 and later include read-only Live lookup methods; while the service is disabled there are no offerings to use. The launch and the integration guide will be announced separately. |
How fees are calculated
- Model charge: based on each model's retail price in the model catalog. Under the
openrouter_reference_markup_v1policy, the retail price is the upstream reference price frozen at review time plus that model's markup (for examplemarkup_bps: 1200= +12%); legacy policies already include their fees in the retail price. Prices are frozen when the request's hold is created, so later price changes never affect a request already sent. - App service fee: not collected yet; real requests charge users no app fee at all.
- Free beta credit: it only pays for AI usage through AI-Pay and cannot be withdrawn, transferred or exchanged for cash; production does not accept top-ups at the moment, so once it is used up you cannot add more yourself. When the beta ends or a grant was issued in error, the platform can take the credit back: it is taken from the credit available at that moment, up to the amount granted, and never takes your balance below zero or asks you to pay anything back.
- Top-up processing fee: shown on the payment screen at top-up time; the payment total is not the credited amount. Production does not accept top-ups at the moment.
- Receipts: every successful response carries a receipt (the actual charge and its split); the Console's "Requests" tab and the wallet activity reconcile request by request.
The full formula, the freezing rules and the receipt fields are in the developer docs under "Model catalog and pricing".
User control and data
- Limits: per-request, daily and monthly spending limits are set by the user on the consent screen; an app can only spend within them.
- Pause and revoke: pausing, revoking or changing limits immediately stops new AI usage; requests already dispatched may still settle under their original rules. Revoking does not sign you out of the app itself and does not delete data the app already obtained.
- Identity: an app receives an app-specific pseudonymous identifier (
sub); different apps cannot use it to correlate the same user. Email is provided only when the user grants that scope. - Data handling: prompts and responses are sent in plain text to the model provider (today mostly OpenRouter and the provider it routes to); this is not end-to-end encryption, and retention policies differ per provider. See the Privacy Policy.
Next steps
| You want to… | Start here |
|---|---|
| Evaluate whether AI-Pay fits | Models & pricing, the pricing explanation, the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy. |
| Integrate your app | The Quick start (five steps). The SDK @coswic/aipay-sdk and the CLI @coswic/aipay are public npm packages; create and verify your app in the Console. |
| Use it as a user | Sign in to see your AI credit, every charge and your connected apps; how authorization works is explained under Sign in with AI-Pay. There is currently no public app directory; the credit is spent inside apps that integrate AI-Pay. |
| Let a coding agent read the docs | Download the Markdown edition: English / 中文; API contract /openapi.yaml. |
Versions and sources
- Review date of this page: 2026-09-30. Feature status was checked against the production code, the production configuration and the public documentation on that day; later changes are reflected in the developer docs and on the screens of each environment.
- API contract:
/openapi.yaml(generated from the code). The current SDK and CLI versions are whatever npm publishes. - Legal document versions are shown at the top of the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy.
- This page explains and never takes part in a transaction: the actual charge follows the prices frozen for that request and its receipt, and an authorization follows the version the user consented to on the consent screen.