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Billing & Usage

Usage & Spend

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Use Usage and Credits views in the OpenModels dashboard to understand how requests consume tokens and credits.

What to monitor

Monitor these signals during development and production:

SignalWhy it matters
Request volumeShows traffic growth and unexpected request spikes
Input tokensHelps estimate prompt cost and context usage
Output tokensHelps estimate generation cost
Total spendShows credit consumption over time
Spend by API keyIdentifies which application or environment is spending credits
Spend by modelIdentifies which models drive cost
BalanceShows whether more credits are needed
Monthly limit usageShows whether a key is close to its configured cap

API key breakdown

Create separate API keys for environments and workloads when you need clean usage attribution.

Examples:

  • development
  • staging
  • production
  • support-agent
  • batch-jobs

This makes it easier to identify which workload consumed credits and which monthly limit should be adjusted.

Model breakdown

Use model-level spend to compare cost and quality. If a workload is expensive, check whether:

  • Prompts are larger than expected
  • Outputs are too long
  • A high-cost model is used where a lower-cost model would work
  • Retries are increasing request volume
  • Tool calling adds extra messages to the conversation

Cost investigation workflow

When spend looks higher than expected:

  1. Check the time window where spend increased.
  2. Break down usage by API key.
  3. Break down usage by model.
  4. Compare input tokens and output tokens.
  5. Check whether retries or long outputs increased token volume.
  6. Adjust model choice, max_tokens, prompts, or monthly spend limits.

Production alerts

For production workloads, use monthly spend limits and auto top-up together:

  • Monthly spend limits prevent one key from overspending.
  • Auto top-up helps prevent balance interruptions.
  • Usage monitoring shows which key or model is driving spend.

If requests fail with insufficient balance or spend limit errors, review Credits, Usage, and Rate Limits together.