Antbase used to greet new accounts with free credit. That has changed. The welcome offer is now a free tier you can keep using, rather than a balance you spend once and then hit a wall. This post is the complete pricing model — including the two ceilings that catch people out, which most pricing pages leave for you to discover on your own.
The free tier
- •50 requests a day, no card, as soon as your email is verified.
- •1,000 requests a day once you have added $10 of credit — and the credit is still yours to spend, the higher limit comes on top of it.
- •Free requests run on genuinely free models via `ant:free` and the free provider pool. They cost you nothing and they do not draw down your balance.
The reason for the switch is simple enough to say out loud: a signup bonus is a worse product than a free tier. Credit runs out, usually while you are still evaluating, and the moment it does the platform stops working for you. A daily allowance renews. You can build against it, leave the project for three weeks, come back, and it still works.
What you pay beyond that
Provider list price. That is the whole answer. Antbase adds no percentage markup on tokens and charges no orchestration or routing fee, including on BYOK. If a model costs $0.60 per million input tokens at the provider, it costs $0.60 per million through Antbase.
Two of those numbers are defaults in the codebase — a token markup and a per-request orchestration fee — and both are pinned at zero by a test that fails the build if either moves. That is deliberate. Every public page here promises no markup, so the config is not allowed to drift away from the promise quietly. If those fees ever become non-zero, the marketing has to change first.
- •Credit is 1:1 — $10 buys $10 of usage. There is no bonus tier and no discount tier, because both are just markup with extra steps.
- •BYOK is free. Bring your own provider key and the provider bills you directly; Antbase takes nothing for routing it.
- •No per-seat pricing. Teams, projects, budgets and model allowlists are part of the product, not an upsell.
The two limits people actually hit
Both of these exist for the same reason — an open platform with a free tier attracts people who want to convert free signups into expensive inference — and both are worth knowing before you meet them.
An account that has never paid cannot reach premium models
Until a workspace completes a payment, requests are held to an average cost ceiling of $0.002 per 1,000 tokens. That covers an enormous range of capable models and excludes the frontier ones. It is not a trick to make you pay: it exists because signup credit was being converted one-for-one into premium upstream spend, which is the one failure mode that would force a real markup on everyone else. Add any credit and the ceiling lifts. BYOK is exempt, since you are paying the provider yourself.
A request that your balance cannot cover is refused before it runs
Every request is priced against your actual balance before it is sent — using the real prompt size, not an estimate. If the prompt alone costs more than you have, you get a clear error telling you the cost, the prompt size and the balance, instead of a request that half-succeeds and leaves you negative. If the prompt fits but the balance cannot cover a full-length reply, Antbase lowers `max_tokens` to what it can pay for rather than refusing outright.
This one is newer than the rest of the model, and it was built after finding single requests that had billed several dollars each and a handful of accounts that had gone past zero. Overspending your own balance is now arithmetically impossible rather than merely unlikely. Free routes and BYOK skip the check entirely, because neither spends your credit.
The small print worth reading
- •Promotional credit — a grant, a referral, anything you did not pay for — expires 12 months after it is issued. Purchased credit does not expire.
- •Free-tier requests are counted per day in UTC and reset at midnight UTC.
- •The daily free allowance applies to free models. Paid models draw on your balance and are not rate-limited by the free tier.
Why this shape
A router makes money in one of two ways: a cut of what you spend upstream, or a subscription. The cut is the easier business and the worse product, because the moment a router earns more when you spend more, it has a reason not to send you to the cheapest provider that clears the bar. Routing you to the cheap model is the entire point of the thing. So there is no cut.
What is left is a straightforward deal: the free tier is how you find out whether this works for you, and provider list price is what you pay when it does.
