BestRelay pricing and the refund window for Gemini CLI users

BestRelay refunds unused top-up credit within 13 days of the top-up

Here is an example day at your own desk, and every figure in it is an example. You sign up, your new account opens with $0.35 of credit, and you add $13.89 through Stripe checkout. You spend part of it on a handful of calls. Later, still inside 13 days of that top-up, you ask for a refund. BestRelay refunds the unused credit on request, less what was consumed and any payment-processor fees. That is the rule in plain words: money you did not spend comes back, minus the calls you already made and minus what the payment processor took.

Two kinds of balance do not travel back the same way. Gift credit and commission cannot be refunded. If credit was given to you as a gift, or if you earned it as commission from referrals, that portion is not part of the refundable top-up. Keeping this line clear matters, because the window is generous but it is not a way to reverse usage. The 13 days run from the top-up itself, and the amount considered is the unused credit at the moment of your request.

BestRelay runs on a prepaid pay-as-you-go balance. There is no monthly fee, no subscription and no minimum spend, so a small top-up is not a commitment. The available top-up amounts are $1.39, $6.94, $13.89, $27.78, $69.44 and $138.89. Nothing is held in advance: each call is charged once, after it ends, from the tokens the provider reports, at the rate card prices. If you top up and change your mind within 13 days, the refund calculation starts from a balance you can read in the dashboard.

BestRelay charges each call once, after it ends, from the tokens the provider reports

Continue the example day. You open a client, pick a model, and send a request. When the call finishes, BestRelay takes the token counts the provider reported, applies the rate card prices for that model, and deducts the charge once from your prepaid balance. There is no reservation of funds while the request is in flight, and no second deduction afterwards. The same routine applies to a long session: many calls, many small charges, one clear ledger.

Calls that go wrong are handled plainly. Requests the provider rejects are recorded at zero, and when the provider cannot be reached, nothing is charged. A failed attempt therefore does not quietly eat into the credit you might later ask to have refunded. This is worth knowing at a desk where a deadline is close and a provider may be having a bad afternoon.

The record of all this is in the usage records, where every call appears with its model, tokens and charge. An account can hold several keys, and each key can be voided at any time, which is a tidy way to separate a project from everything else. The limits are stated in the same practical terms: 120 requests a minute on one key, and 8 calls in flight on one account. BestRelay tells you the ceiling rather than letting you discover it by guessing.

BestRelay lists 20 public models under their own names, each with four prices

The line-up is curated: 20 public models, each listed under its own name with four prices for input, output, cache write and cache read. When a provider retires a model id, BestRelay delists it. The point of the arrangement is plain: the model you name is the model that answers, and nothing is quietly swapped for a cheaper tier behind your back. You choose from what is listed, you pay the listed rate, and the usage records name the model that actually ran.

To take one example, a day of 500,000 input and 100,000 output tokens on Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs $1.40 on BestRelay, and 22 such days cost $30.71. With 350,000 of the input read from cache, the day costs $0.94. At the official list price the same day is $2.00, the 22 days $44.00 and the cached day $1.33, so the difference on the day is $0.60 and on the 22 days $13.29.

A second example, GPT-6.1 Sol, shows a similar shape: the same day of 500,000 input and 100,000 output tokens costs $0.22 on BestRelay, 22 such days cost $4.74, and with 350,000 of the input read from cache the day costs $0.16. At the official list price the day is $2.00, the 22 days $44.00 and the cached day $1.33, making the difference on the day $1.78 and on the 22 days $39.26. The $0.35 of free credit that opens every new account covers about 1.6 million GPT-6.1 Sol input tokens on its own. Other entries read the same way: Claude Opus 5.5 is $1.74 input, $8.13 output, $2.01 cache write and $0.0778 cache read per 1,000,000 tokens, and Gemini 3.1 Pro is $1.74, $9.93, $1.74 and $0.1389.

BestRelay connects through two settings, and its client rules are not negotiable

Back at the desk, you need two settings to connect: the address, and a key created under API keys in the dashboard. The details are in the docs, and the address is not something to print in an article or paste into a chat. Beyond those two settings, the model families come with their own boundaries, and BestRelay states them rather than leaving you to guess from an error message.

Claude models are served only to the official Claude Code and Claude Desktop clients, version 2.1.285 or newer. They do not work in Cursor, Cherry Studio, Cline, OpenCode, any SDK or cURL. Those tools, like Codex, pair only with GPT, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Qwen and Grok. Gemini models use only their native protocol, through Gemini CLI or direct generateContent calls, and are not OpenAI-compatible.

So the example day has a shape. If you work in Claude Code, you name a Claude model such as Claude Opus 5.5 and read its four prices before you start. If you work in Gemini CLI, you stay inside the Gemini protocol and pick from the Gemini entries. If you live in Codex, you choose from the GPT, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Qwen and Grok line. Either way, BestRelay keeps the same promise: you choose the model by name, and the model you named is the one that answers.

BestRelay keeps referral commission apart from refundable top-up credit

The last part of the example day is arithmetic you may want to keep separate from the refund. Referrals earn 18% of the top-ups of people who joined through your link, and 4% of the top-ups of the people they invited. To illustrate, on an invited member's top-up of $13.89, the two commissions are $2.50 and $0.5556. Commission can be moved into the balance, or withdrawn to Alipay from $20.83.

That separation is deliberate in the refund terms. Gift credit and commission cannot be refunded, so commission belongs in its own column rather than being folded into the top-up figure you might request money back on. If you are only topping up for your own use, the refund rule stays simple: unused credit, requested within 13 days, less consumption and processor fees.

One more detail is worth reading once. The user-written text of requests is kept for 30 days to review abuse and settle billing questions, while system prompts and model replies are not stored. Every call still appears in the usage records with its model, tokens and charge, which is what you need to reconcile a balance before deciding whether to request a refund. When you have read the terms and the rate card, you can open a BestRelay account and try the line-up at your own desk.