Pricing & how we make money

Route Tools makes money one way: you pay the provider’s published list price plus a 20% routing fee, per successful call. That is the entire business model.

• Failed calls are never billed. If every provider in the failover chain fails, you pay nothing.
• No subscriptions, no minimums, no top-up fees. Credits are prepaid ($10 / $50 / $100 packs, $2 free on signup) and never expire.
• Every response shows its exact price in usage.price, and the dashboard shows per-call history.
• Exact per-provider prices are published on the comparison pages with the list price and the routed price side by side, generated from the same open-source catalog the router reads.

Bring your own keys

If you attach your own provider keys (BYOK), calls to those providers bill you a 5% platform fee on list price instead, and the provider charges you directly for the underlying usage at your rates.

Why state this so plainly?

Because the two questions any sensible buyer asks of an intermediary are “how do they make money?” and “so when does this shut down or jack prices?” The answers are: the 20% fee, and it doesn’t — the fee is in the open-source catalog, so a change would be a public diff.

Spend controls

• Optional monthly spend cap per API key (set at key creation in the dashboard); a capped key returns spend_limit_exceeded instead of overspending.
• A low-balance email before your agents stop.
• A per-call worst-case price gate: a call that could cost more than your remaining balance is rejected up front with insufficient_credits.