Pricing and lanes
Available lanes and prices are shown in the model catalog. A model may expose one or more available lanes. Internal/API values direct and cheap identify routing-price lanes; they do not by themselves certify a provider identity, compliance status, uptime or latency guarantee.
Stable lane and discount lane
The stable lane runs on each maker's official API, is billed at the list price, has the highest availability and suits every use. The discount lane is a reverse-engineered route: a third-party supplier serves the model through its official client, not the official API. It costs far less, but availability varies, a failed request does not fall back to the stable lane, and the supplier may add its own system prompt. So use it only inside the matching agent tool: Claude models in Claude Code, GPT models in Codex, Gemini models in Antigravity. For your own code, or anywhere the output must be controlled exactly, use the stable lane. Both lanes work with the same key, and each key picks the lane per model.
Read current prices
Use /api/models/catalog with your API key: its pricing object is the adjusted catalog price for that key, while lanes describes published lane prices and availability. Do not substitute the public /v1/models or session-based catalog pricing shape for this route. Check the serving lane and any applicable peak schedule when estimating. Missing price fields do not mean zero. The final request receipt records the charge.
curl --fail-with-body https://api.lazu.ai/api/models/catalog \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $LAZU_API_KEY" \
| jq '.data[] | {id, supported_endpoints, pricing, lanes}'Selection and fallback
Inspect your API key settings and the model’s current lanes. A cheap preference is strict: if its price or a compatible channel is unavailable, the request fails. Once a cheap channel is selected, an upstream failure is returned without retrying another channel or falling back to direct. Select direct explicitly if you want stable-lane pricing and retries. Reference prices, when present, are for comparison only and are not the charge. Do not treat example prices or a past catalog response as a current quote.
Price changes
Prices and available routes can change. Refresh the catalog before estimating a new workload; preserve the request ID and receipt for reconciliation. Do not infer a new price for an old request from today’s catalog.