Payments and costs

1How to top up

Dashboard → Payments, minimum $1:

Russian cards are temporarily unavailable — use SBP. You see the final amount before paying.

Bonuses: $0.50 for subscribing to @zukkopro (once per Telegram account, claim it in the dashboard). 10% of top-ups by people you invite, via the referral link in the dashboard. There's no sign-up bonus.

2What a request costs

Cost = input tokens × input price + output tokens × output price. Prices per 1M tokens are in Models and pricing. Input read from the cache costs less.

Rule of thumb: a page of English text is about 700 tokens.

An hour in Claude Code usually costs $0.8–1.6. To spend less, see How to pay less.

3When a request is refused

• Email not verified — 403 email_unverified (not needed if you signed in with Telegram).
• Balance below $0.01 — 402 insufficient_balance.

Charges happen after the answer, for what was used. A long request can take the balance negative; then the next ones get 402, and a top-up clears the negative first.

4What's free

• Requests refused before the model: no money, key limit, unknown model, invalid key.
• Error responses.
• Answers from the Zukko cache (X-Zukko-Cache: true) and repeats with the same Idempotency-Key.
• /v1/balance and /v1/usage.

5What's paid, though not obvious

• An interrupted stream — the answer is read to the end and charged in full.
• POST /v1/messages/count_tokens — at the input price.
• POST /v1/web-search — as a small token charge.
• Reasoning by "thinking" models — that's tokens too.

6Where to see spending

• Dashboard → Usage — each request with its model, tokens and cost.
• API: GET /v1/usage and GET /v1/balance.
• The X-Zukko-Cost-Micros header on a regular (non-streaming) response — the request's cost.

The balance is shared: all keys, the web chat and the Telegram bot spend the same money.

About a minute after a request, its cost is recalculated with exact cache data — the difference is refunded or charged.

7Per-key limits

In the dashboard you can set a daily and monthly limit and a list of allowed models for each key.

Resets at 00:00 UTC and on the 1st. An empty limit or 0 means no limit. The last request may go slightly over. More: Key limits and cache.

8Units in the API