Moderations Pricing From August 7
Starting Friday, August 7, 2026, the /v1/moderations endpoint is billed at a flat $0.00001 per successful request — no token metering, no per-model rates, and no charge for failed or retried attempts. Because it becomes paid, it also starts requiring a credit balance: top up before August 7 or moderation stops working for organizations with no credits.
Safety classification is cheap upstream but not free to serve: every moderation call still goes through routing, key rotation, logging, and retention like any other request. So far /v1/moderations has been recorded at zero cost, which left the request handling unpriced and made moderation traffic invisible in spend analytics. From Friday, August 7, 2026, the moderations endpoint is billed at a flat $0.00001 per successful request. Until that date, moderation requests stay free.
What Changes On August 7
| Behavior | Today | From August 7 |
|---|---|---|
| Successful request | $0 | $0.00001, regardless of input size |
| Failed request | $0 | $0 |
| Retried attempt | $0 | $0 — only the successful attempt bills |
| Moderation model | No effect on price | No effect on price |
api-keys mode | No credits deducted | No credits deducted |
The price is per request, not per input item and not per token: classifying one string and classifying a batch of fifty cost the same. Every moderation model the endpoint accepts, including omni-moderation-latest, bills at that same flat rate.
Action Required: Keep Credits Topped Up
Because the endpoint becomes paid, it also starts requiring a credit balance.
From August 7, moderation requests from an organization with no credits are
rejected with 402 and the endpoint stops working until you top up. If you
have been using /v1/moderations on a zero-credit organization because it was
free, add credits before August 7 to avoid an interruption.
Projects in api-keys mode that serve moderation with their own OpenAI key are
not affected and need no balance.
Nothing To Change In Your Code
The request and response shapes are unchanged, and no migration is needed:
1curl https://api.llmgateway.io/v1/moderations \2 -H "Authorization: Bearer $LLM_GATEWAY_API_KEY" \3 -d '{4 "input": "I want to harm someone."5 }'1curl https://api.llmgateway.io/v1/moderations \2 -H "Authorization: Bearer $LLM_GATEWAY_API_KEY" \3 -d '{4 "input": "I want to harm someone."5 }'At 100,000 moderation calls that is $1.00 in total. Requests served with your own OpenAI key in api-keys mode will continue to deduct no credits — the cost is recorded on the log for visibility only.
Once the price takes effect, moderation calls carry a real per-request cost in your activity logs and cost breakdowns, so moderation spend is attributable per project and per API key like the rest of your traffic.