4AICode charges based on total tokens (prompt + completion combined), and each team has a monthly quota.
Units: What Is a Token
A token is neither a character nor a word. Rough estimates:
- English: 1 token ≈ 3–4 characters / 0.75 words
- Chinese: 1 Chinese character ≈ 1–2 tokens
- Code: somewhere between English and Chinese
Example: a 1,000-character Chinese document ≈ 1,500–2,000 input tokens; a 500-character response ≈ 800–1,000 output tokens.
Monthly Quotas
- Individual accounts: receive free credits upon registration
- Teams: configured according to the plan
Progress is refreshed every minute in Dashboard → View Usage. Quotas reset at 00:00 UTC on the 1st of each month.
Overages
Immediately returns HTTP 429:
{
"code": "quota_exceeded",
"message": "monthly quota reached, contact admin"
}
The request is not sent upstream, so no charges apply. Access is automatically restored on the 1st of the following month.
Cost Control
Choose Smaller Models
claude-haiku-*is an order of magnitude cheaper than sonnet / opusgpt-5.4-miniis cheaper thangpt-5.4
For simple tasks (summarization, classification, translation), try haiku / mini first.
Control max_tokens
Anthropic /v1/messages requires max_tokens. Set it according to actual needs—do not default to 4096:
{
"max_tokens": 512,
"messages": [...]
}
Truncating output and continuing is always cheaper than setting an excessively high limit in a single request.
Deduplicate System Prompts
Resending a long system prompt (thousands of words) each time is expensive:
- Use Prompt Caching (supported by Claude, GPT-6 Astra, and GPT-5.6) to reuse stable prefixes
- Put stable content at the beginning and variable content at the end
GPT-6 Astra / GPT-5.6 Caching and Long-Context Pricing
- Writing to the prompt cache is billed at 1.25× the standard input rate; cache hits are billed at the cache-read rate.
- When total input for a single request exceeds 272,000 tokens, input for the entire request is billed at 2× and output at 1.5×.
- Usage details separately record standard input, cache writes, cache reads, and output. Final charges are settled based on actual usage.
Streaming and Non-Streaming Cost the Same
stream: true does not affect billing.
Requesting a Higher Quota
Contact your administrator or [email protected]. Administrators can update it in 30 seconds.
FAQ
Q: Can I see how much each token cost? A: Yes. Filter by token on the usage page.
Q: When is billing applied? A: When the response completes (or when a stream disconnects). 4xx / 5xx responses are not billed.
Q: Can I limit a specific token to spending only 20% of the team quota? A: Sub-quotas are not currently supported. For now, use revocation + controlled distribution to enforce limits.