Why we charge once, at top-up — not on every call
· By WayJet AI
A markup buried inside the token price is a fee you cannot see. We take a platform fee when you top up, then pass provider rates through at cost. Here is the reasoning, and the math.
There are two places a gateway can make its margin: inside every token, or once, when you add credit. The first is invisible. A per-token markup lives in the rate card, moves whenever the provider’s price moves, and never shows up as a line you can point at. You pay it on every call and cannot tell how much of any bill was the model and how much was the middleman.
We chose the second. When you top up by card, a platform fee of 5% is added on top of the credit, shown as its own line before you pay; a top-up under $50 also carries a fixed $0.53. A stablecoin top-up carries 6%. After that, requests are billed at the provider’s own rate. There is no fee per request.
The math on a $100 top-up
By card: $100.00 of credit and a $5.00 platform fee. You pay $105.00 and $100.00 lands in your wallet. There is no card processing fee on top: the processor’s cut comes out of our fee, not out of your credit. A $20 top-up carries $1.00 plus the fixed $0.53, so you pay $21.53. The breakdown on the top-up page is read live from the same figures the payment page uses, so the two never disagree by a cent.
Then the credit is spent at cost. A request that the provider prices at $0.0021 takes $0.0021 from the wallet, and the usage record names the model that served it and the tokens it took.
Why this is better for you
It is auditable. Every fee you have paid us is a line on a top-up you can find in the ledger, and every request is priced at a rate you can compare with the provider’s own page. It is predictable: the fee does not change when a provider changes its price. And it aligns us with you, because the only way we earn more is if you find the layer worth topping up again.
Why it is better for us
A margin hidden in the rate card is a margin we would have to defend every time a provider moved its price. A fee you can see is a fee we have to be able to justify in one sentence. We prefer the second kind of pressure.