OpenRouter credits — why ~$5 matters (3 minutes)

Current state: the key you gave has $0 balance. Free models work, but they are rate-limited and occasionally overloaded (502 provider_unavailable during testing). For a smooth demo, the paid primary is worth it.

The math at our usage profile (30 messages/day + 1 routine/day): DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on OpenRouter costs ≈ $0.75/bot/month ≈ ₹66 — that's the number that makes ₹250/bot work. $5 funds roughly 6–7 bot-months of realistic use, plus all the demo traffic.

Steps

  1. Open openrouter.ai → sign in with the account that owns the key (sk-or-v1-e61b...).
  2. Top-right avatar → Settings → Credits (or go to openrouter.ai/credits).
  3. Add credits → $5 (or more) → pay by card. Crypto/paypal options vary by region.
  4. That's it — no config needed on your side.

Verify (I'll do this)

curl https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/credits -H "Authorization: Bearer <key>"
# expect: {"total_credits":5, ...}

What I do next

  1. Flip aquila-default primary to paid deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash (one config line) — keeping the two free models as fallback so a dead card never kills the demo.
  2. Re-run the live chat + spend check; you'll see non-zero ₹ in the cost dashboard (e.g. paise per message) — which is exactly the economics story for Sriram.

If you'd rather not pay now

Fine — the free chain works for the POC. Consequences: occasional slow/502 responses, and the spend dashboard reads ₹0 (which understates the real cost story). Day 3's economics report will use the published DeepSeek price as the modeled number either way.