Pricing
Free for three months. Then a base fee, and a share of what we actually save you.
The success fee is charged on savings the gateway measured itself — cache hits and automatic downgrades, recorded per request. If it saves you nothing in a month, there is nothing to pay beyond the base.
Trial
Freefor 3 months
No card. Every account starts here, from the moment you sign in.
- The whole product, including the automatic optimizations
- Every request logged and priced to the token
- Waste scoring and recommendations
- Security guardrails in detect and enforce mode
Pro
$99/ month
Plus 30% of realized savings, invoiced monthly and separately.
- Everything in the trial, without the clock
- Automatic caching and model routing stay active
- Enforce mode stays active on the guardrails
- Cancel from the dashboard at any time
What counts as a realized saving
Only two things, both measured at the gateway on the request itself — not modelled, not projected, not estimated from a sample:
- A cache hit. An identical deterministic request served from cache costs nothing. The saving recorded is exactly what the original call cost.
- An automatic downgrade. When routing moves a call to a cheaper model, the saving is what the originally requested model would have cost for those same token counts, minus what the cheaper model actually cost.
A recommendation you have not accepted is not a saving. A projection is not a saving. Both are on your dashboard, clearly separated from the realized figure the fee is calculated on.
How it is billed
- The $99 base is a PayPal subscription you approve once.
- The 30% success fee is a separate PayPal invoice raised once a month for 30% of that month’s realized savings.
- Months where the fee would come to less than $1 are skipped entirely — nothing is charged.
Payment processing is configuration-driven; if it is not yet live in your region or account, the billing endpoints say so rather than failing quietly, and the status page reports billing as not enabled.
What happens when the trial ends
You keep your ledger. Logging, pricing, the waste score, the recommendations and detect-mode guardrails carry on for a lapsed trial. What stops without a Pro plan is the part that changes your requests: automatic caching, automatic model routing, and enforce mode on the guardrails.
When ModelGate is worth it — and when to wait
Two things decide it, and we would rather say so now.
- Spend. Below roughly $500 a month on model APIs, even a large percentage cut is a small absolute number — rarely worth changing how you call your models.
- Traffic history. Waste is a pattern. Week one prices your spend to the token; what repeats, what is oversized and what is overpaying only becomes visible once there is volume behind it.
Questions
The Terms of Service cover fees, cancellation and refunds in full. Anything else: support@modelgatehq.com.