# Credits and pricing

Gateway calls are paid from your organization’s credits, at the price each offering lists in the model catalog. There is no separate price list: what the catalog says is what a call is charged, and a call on your own provider key is charged a share of it.

## Credits

A credit is a thousandth of a US dollar by default: 1,000 credits are $1.00. An organization's members share one balance,
held by its owner. A Gateway organization is billed on its own: its credits don't pay for a Workflow organization or a
Search account, even one the same person holds. When an organization's balance is first opened it receives a one-time
starter grant, $25.00 by default, which expires after 365 days.

The owner adds credits in Settings › Credits & billing, or turns on Auto-reload there, which adds a set amount when the
balance drops below a threshold. The smallest automatic reload is $5.00.

## What a call costs

Each answer a call is given reports the tokens it used, and each kind of token is priced at the rate the offering lists
under `pricing` in the [catalog](/docs/gateway/reference/list-models/):

| `pricing` field | What it prices |
|---|---|
| `promptTokens` | Input tokens, per million. |
| `completionTokens` | Output tokens, per million. |
| `cacheReadMultiplier` | Input read from the provider's cache, as a multiple of `promptTokens`. |
| `cacheWriteMultiplier` | Input written to the provider's cache, as a multiple of `promptTokens`. |
| `thoughtTokens` | Reasoning tokens a provider counts apart from its output, per million. |
| `perUnit` | For a model priced by the unit, `price` is US dollars for one `unit`: a `page` an OCR model read, or a `minute` of the recording a transcription model transcribed, counted in fractions of a minute. |

A request's costs are added up and charged when the request ends, rounded up to a whole credit. Work done for the
call is part of it: a model that [converts a file](/docs/gateway/files/) is charged as that model's provider charges
it, by its tokens, the pages it read or the minutes of audio it transcribed.

A call that runs on your own provider key, sent with the call or saved for your organization, is billed by that provider
to your account, and charged from your credits a share of the price the catalog lists: 5% by default, a setting of the
deployment. The same share applies to Search and to workflow runs on your saved keys. See
[bring your own keys](/docs/gateway/bring-your-own-keys/#what-a-call-on-your-key-costs).

## Seeing what you spent

Every attempt on a call's record carries `costUsd`, what it cost at the price of the offering it ran on. Read one call
with [Get a generation](/docs/gateway/reference/generation/), or list your organization's calls and their totals by day
as described in [usage and costs](/docs/gateway/usage/).

## Choosing on price

Gateway orders the offerings that can serve a call by price, cheapest first, unless you rank them yourself. Offerings
on your organization's [prioritized keys](/docs/gateway/bring-your-own-keys/) go ahead of that order. See
[choosing a model](/docs/gateway/choosing-a-model/).