Pricing

Every paid operation on the Partner API debits a single credit wallet on your Layers organization. Ingest is free today; generation costs credits; overage is handled by top-up or opt-in auto-topup.

Credit dollar-rates are set by your plan, not this page. The per-credit price you pay, your monthly included credits, and top-up rates are all surfaced in the Layers dashboard under your subscription. Enterprise pricing is negotiated — contact sales@layers.com.

For the programmatic wallet check used before a generate call, see GET /v1/credits.

Format cost table (in credits)

Credits per operation are the same on every plan — what varies is the $/credit your plan charges. The numbers below match estimatedCreditsPerFormat returned by GET /v1/credits. They are defaults — a specific layer template can override its per-workflow credit cost in its default config, and the override wins.

auto resolves to one of the specific formats at render time based on asset availability. If it resolves to a slideshow, the 50-credit rate applies; any video output charges the 120 default.

Ingest costs

Ingest calls are free today. The GET /v1/credits response reflects this on the ingestCostsBilled object — all three flags are false.

If Layers ever flips one of these to billed, we commit to 30-day advance notice via the Changelog, a notice in the partner-tier Slack channel, and an updated row in this page's change log (below) listing the exact per-call credit deduction. The ingestCostsBilled flag on /v1/credits will flip to true on the same date, so partners who gate programmatically will see it before a single bill posts.

Overage & exhaustion

At balance zero, every credit-spending call returns 402 BILLING_EXHAUSTED:

{
  "code": "BILLING_EXHAUSTED",
  "message": "Credit balance exhausted. Top up to resume.",
  "details": {
    "topUpUrl": "https://app.layers.com/billing/top-up",
    "balance": 0,
    "requiredCredits": 10
  }
}

Calls that do not spend credits (reads, whoami, job polling, webhook receipt) continue to work — the plan gate only blocks credit-spending operations.

Auto-topup is off by default. Enable it in the dashboard at https://app.layers.com/billing/auto-topup:

• Set a trigger threshold (e.g. balance ≤ 100 credits).
• Set a top-up amount (e.g. purchase 2,000 credits).
• Auto-topup uses the default payment method on file.
• Failures of the top-up charge surface as a billing.topup_failed event in the audit log and a webhook if you've registered billing.*.

Without auto-topup, you top up manually via the dashboard or via your Layers contact for Enterprise invoicing.

Forecasting spend

Use estimatedCreditsPerFormat from GET /v1/credits as the pre-flight check before firing a generate call. The response also carries usedThisPeriod and includedRemaining — everything you need to render a "you've used X of Y this period" bar in your own dashboard.

const wallet = await fetch("https://api.layers.com/v1/credits", {
  headers: { "X-Api-Key": process.env.LAYERS_API_KEY! },
}).then((r) => r.json());

const cost = wallet.estimatedCreditsPerFormat.video_remix;
if (wallet.balance < cost) {
  // 402 will fire if we proceed; warn the user and link to top-up.
  throw new Error(`Low balance: ${wallet.balance} < ${cost}`);
}

Changelog (pricing-specific)

Material changes to credit-per-operation rates or ingest billing land here with a date. Non-material changes (copy edits, clarifications) are not logged. Subscription-tier $/credit changes are plan-level and do not appear here.

See also

• GET /v1/credits — programmatic wallet check
• Errors — BILLING_EXHAUSTED (402) semantics
• Rate limits — per-tier rate ceilings