Plain-language terms.

1. What this is

Leanroute is an LLM gateway. You send us requests in OpenAI's wire format; we route them to a provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, xAI, Qwen, GLM, Doubao, Kimi, Sarvam, or Krutrim), translate the response back to OpenAI shape, and bill you either through a monthly BYOK subscription or a pay-as-you-go prepaid credit balance. By creating an account or sending requests through our API, you agree to these terms.

2. Pricing

Two pricing models. You choose which fits your workload; you can switch between them at any time via /dashboard/billing. Under both models, we take zero per-request markup on inference — platform revenue is either the flat subscription fee or the deposit fee on top-ups.

(a) BYOK subscription — bring your own provider keys

• Starter — $15 / month. Includes 1,000,000 requests per calendar month and a 30-request-per-minute cap. 14-day free trial with a card required at signup; the card is not charged during the trial. You may cancel any time before the trial ends to avoid the first charge. Exceeding the request cap returns 429 until the cycle rolls over or you upgrade.
• Pro — $25 / month. Includes 5,000,000 requests per calendar month and a 150-request-per-minute cap. Requests beyond 5M are billed at $3 per 1,000,000 additional requests and debited from your credit balance (see (b) below). Same 14-day trial as Starter.
• Enterprise. Custom limits, dedicated regions, custom guardrail policies, and invoicing terms via master services agreement. Contact [email protected].

On a BYOK subscription you pay your provider directly for tokens using your own keys; we take no per-request markup on inference. The monthly fee covers routing, caching, guardrails, observability, and logs. Subscription cancellation is cancel-at-period-end via the Stripe Customer Portal (linked from /dashboard/billing). Access continues until the end of the paid period; no partial refund is issued for unused days.

(b) Pay-as-you-go credits — we front the provider

• Top-up minimum. $50 USD per transaction by credit card. Maximum $5,000 per transaction; contact support for higher.
• 5% platform fee at deposit. A one-time fee of 5% of the gross top-up amount is applied at deposit and retained by us; the net (95%) lands in your prepaid credit balance. Example: a $50 card top-up nets $47.50 credit; a $100 card top-up nets $95 credit.
• $0 per-request inference markup. Each successful request deducts the actual upstream provider cost from your balance. We do not add a per-request fee on top of the upstream number.
• $0 on cache hits. If we serve a response from cache, we don't charge for it.
• Actual cost, not sticker. If you opt in to cheaper-model swaps and we route your Sonnet request to DeepSeek-V3, we charge for the DeepSeek call, not the Sonnet call.

When your balance drops below a small positive threshold — or when a Pro subscriber exceeds their monthly cap without enough balance to fund overage — the gateway returns 402 (insufficient credit) on new requests. Top up to resume.

3. Pricing transparency

We do not charge a per-request markup on inference under either pricing model. All platform revenue is either the flat BYOK subscription fee (billed monthly by Stripe) or the 5% deposit fee applied once at top-up. You can verify our numbers against the providers' published prices at any time.

We do not charge to serve cached responses — a cache hit is billed at $0 because no upstream call is made. We do not charge extra to perform a cheaper-model swap; we bill for the model the upstream provider actually answered with, not the one you requested.

Every request-log line item shows (a) the upstream provider, (b) the model, (c) the upstream cost we observed, and (d) whether the request landed via BYOK or via managed keys. Stripe invoices for the subscription fee and top-up receipts (including the 5% platform fee) are available in the Stripe Customer Portal.

Prices, minimums, and included quotas may change. Per section 11, material pricing changes take effect no fewer than 30 days after notice.

4. BYOK (bring your own keys)

You may configure your own provider API keys in /dashboard/providers. Those keys are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM under a master key we never check into source control; we decrypt only on the request path. Requests routed through a BYOK key are billed by the upstream provider directly to you; we do not touch your token spend. On a BYOK subscription (section 2(a)) you pay the flat monthly fee for the gateway layer; on pay-as-you-go credits (section 2(b)) you pay only the 5% platform fee already applied at deposit — no additional charge for BYOK dispatch.

5. Spend caps + rate limits

You may set daily and monthly spend caps in USD and request / token rate limits per minute, at both the organization and per-API-key level. These are hard limits enforced at the gateway edge with 402 (spend) and 429 (rate). The stricter of (org limit, key limit) wins. Use them.

6. What we route, what we don't

We respect the model you request. We do not swap to a cheaper model unless you have opted in at the organization level, and even then any individual request can override with the X-Gateway-Routing: explicit header. We do not swap when tools are set on the request, and we do not cross quality tiers. Vision-bearing requests default to the requested provider unless you separately opt in to vision arbitrage.

7. Acceptable use

You agree not to use the gateway to generate or distribute content that is unlawful in your jurisdiction or in Singapore, to attempt to extract our managed-key credentials, to evade the spend caps or rate limits, or to interfere with the service. Upstream providers also have their own acceptable-use policies; we surface the relevant ones in our documentation. We may suspend an account that materially breaches these terms; we will tell you why.

8. Service availability

We aim for high availability and run multi-account failover (we transparently retry your request on a same-tier alternative when the originally-routed provider returns 5xx) but the gateway is a best-effort service at launch. No SLA is promised; an SLA tier may follow once we've been running long enough to commit to one honestly.

9. Refunds + chargebacks

Credits (pay-as-you-go). Top-ups are refundable for unspent credit balance at our discretion; email [email protected] with the invoice ID. The 5% platform fee applied at deposit is non-refundable, as it represents platform-side costs (payment processing, FX, compliance) incurred at the moment of deposit.

BYOK subscription. Trial cancellations before the end of the 14-day trial are never charged (the trial card is captured but not billed until day 15). Subscription fees, once billed, are non-refundable. Cancellation is cancel-at-period-end via the Stripe Customer Portal; access continues until the end of the paid period. No partial refund is issued for unused days within a paid month.

We log every credit-moving Stripe event for audit purposes so we can reconstruct any balance later.

10. Liability + warranty

Service is provided "as is." To the extent permitted by law, our aggregate liability for any claim arising from your use of the service is limited to the amount you have paid us in the three months preceding the claim. We are not liable for indirect, consequential, or punitive damages, including loss of profits or data. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited under Singapore law.

11. Changes

We may update these terms. Material changes (pricing structure, data-handling posture, refund mechanics) will be announced at least 30 days before they take effect, via the dashboard and the email address on your account. Continued use after the effective date means you accept the change.

12. Governing law + notices

These terms are governed by the laws of Singapore. Any dispute is subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Singapore courts. Formal legal notices — including anything that needs to reach our counsel rather than support — should be sent to [email protected]. For everything else (account questions, billing, integration help), use [email protected].