LowRouterBeta

Pricing and currency conversion

Most providers we route to publish their per-token prices in USD rather than EUR. To keep accounting and balances simple, every balance and every charge is in EUR, and we convert non-EUR provider prices to EUR once a day before they reach the catalogue.

This page explains how that conversion works, why the displayed price on a USD-billed provider isn’t quite the same as the headline USD figure, and what happens when our FX feed is unavailable.

The conversion buffer described here is the only thing added to a provider’s per-token price. LowRouter’s own fees apply at credit top-up, not per token, and are published with worked examples on the pricing page.

How the conversion is computed

For each non-EUR provider price we ingest, the stored EUR value is:

Text
stored_eur_per_1m_tokens =
    source_per_1m_tokens
    × source_to_eur_rate
    × (1 + fx_buffer_percent / 100)
  • source_per_1m_tokens: the price the provider publishes in their billing currency (USD for most providers).
  • source_to_eur_rate: the daily rate that converts the provider’s currency into EUR. The primary source is Airwallex; if Airwallex is unavailable, we fall back to the reference rates published by the European Central Bank at the eurofxref-daily.xml endpoint.
  • fx_buffer_percent: a fixed conversion markup applied on top of the FX rate, defaulting to 1 %. The markup covers FX-spread drift between the day we fetched the rate and the day we settle with the provider, plus payment-rail conversion fees.

For example, a provider publishing $0.15 per 1M tokens at a reference rate of 1 EUR = 0.90 USD (so 1 USD = 1.111 EUR) and a 1 % markup becomes:

Text
0.15 × 1.111 × 1.01 ≈ 0.1683 EUR per 1M tokens

That is what your balance is debited for every 1M tokens you spend on that model.

Where you see the dual figures

Providers that already bill in EUR (e.g. /providers/scaleway) render a single figure: their published EUR price, shown as-is with no conversion. Providers that bill in USD (most of them: OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Vertex, Groq, …) render both numbers:

Text
$0.15/M (€0.17 billed)

The first figure is the upstream price you’d see on the provider’s own pricing page. The second is the EUR value your balance is debited at, computed with the formula above. Hovering the price shows the FX rate, the markup, and when the conversion was last refreshed.

Long-context price bands

Some routes charge more for long prompts: gpt-5.4 past 272K tokens, or Claude Haiku 5.5 past 100K. GET /v1/models lists these bands under regions[].pricing.context_tiers, ordered by threshold_tokens. A band applies to a prompt of strictly more than threshold_tokens tokens, with cache reads and cache writes counted in the prompt. Once it applies, the whole request is billed at the band’s prices, input, output and cache alike, and not only the tokens over the threshold. Every price in a band is the price you are billed above its threshold. When the provider raises only some prices (input and output but not cache reads, for example), the band repeats the unchanged base price, so you never have to work it out. At or below the lowest threshold, the flat prices apply. A route without bands has no context_tiers field.

For an auto/ model, auto_routing.pricing_range.context_tiers has one entry for each threshold at which any candidate route changes price. Each entry bounds what every candidate bills for a prompt above that threshold. A candidate without a band at that length counts at the price it bills there.

Catalogue prices in USD

GET /v1/models?currency=usd (and GET /v1/models/{id}?currency=usd) returns the same catalogue with its prices expressed in USD, for tools that list one USD figure per model. It changes the numbers in regions[].pricing and auto_routing.pricing_range and nothing else. Each price is expressed per route, from the provider’s own quote:

  • USD-billed providers: the upstream list price, as the provider publishes it. No conversion, so no FX buffer either.
  • EUR-billed providers: the EUR price converted at the ECB monthly fixing, rounded to 4 decimals per 1M tokens, with no buffer. The fixing is the ECB reference rate on the first TARGET business day of the month. It is re-fixed mid-month only if the daily ECB rate moves more than 2% away from it, so the USD figures change about once a month rather than every day.

Cache, batch and long-context band prices follow the same rule as prompt and completion prices. A band whose USD quote is not yet known is left out rather than derived from the EUR price. Every entry returned with ?currency= carries an fx array naming each conversion applied (pair, rate, date, source), and it is empty when every price on the entry is the provider’s own USD quote. For an auto/ model, the range is taken after each candidate route is expressed in USD.

These USD figures are display values; your balance is still debited in EUR. For a USD-billed provider, the EUR debit is the conversion described above: the daily rate plus the conversion buffer. It is therefore not the USD figure multiplied by the monthly fixing.

Refresh cadence

We pull FX rates once per ingest run, which runs daily. When the fallback ECB feed is in use, note that ECB publishes on TARGET business days at ~16:00 CET, and Saturday and Sunday reuse Friday’s published rate, which is the standard ECB convention.

Your debit at request time uses the most recent stored EUR value. This means the price you see in the catalogue today may differ slightly from what was billed yesterday for the same number of tokens, by the size of the FX move plus markup drift.

When the FX feed is unavailable

If we cannot reach our FX sources (both Airwallex and the ECB fallback) during an ingest run, we soft-disable the affected providers (the USD-billed ones that need conversion) until the feed recovers. While soft-disabled, those providers are visible in the catalogue but won’t accept new requests, and an internal alert (FX_INGEST_STALE) notifies the team.

We deliberately do not fall back to a hard-coded rate. A guessed rate can silently under-charge our margin or over-charge customers, so we prefer the providers to be visibly unavailable.

What we don’t claim

  • We don’t offer a rate lock. The price you see today is the price we charge today; tomorrow’s rate may differ. If you need a fixed price, the model’s EUR figure is the one we honour at the moment of the request, not a quote held in advance.
  • We don’t pass through every provider price change in real time. The catalogue reflects the most recent successful ingest, which is daily. A provider price change mid-day will land in the next run.
  • We don’t bill in any currency other than EUR. EUR is our single operating currency: balances, charges, the price list, and checkout are all EUR. Providers that publish in USD are converted once a day as described above, which keeps a single ledger and a single set of accounting rules.

Configuration

For self-hosted operators, the conversion markup can be tuned via the LOWROUTER_FX_BUFFER_PERCENT environment variable (default 1.0, clamped to [0, 20]). The change takes effect on the next ingest run.