AICredits.in Review: 300+ AI Models in INR, No International Card Needed

The first time I tried to sign up for the Anthropic API directly, the billing page asked for a credit card. My Indian debit card bounced. My domestic credit card bounced. Even after enabling international transactions on one card, the payment processor rejected it. I eventually gave up and used a friend's US account. That's a workflow that doesn't scale — and it's the same story across OpenAI, Mistral, and xAI.

AICredits.in fixes this in a way that's embarrassingly simple: you top up a wallet with UPI, and you get a single API key that works with 300+ models across seven providers. That's the whole pitch. It works.

What AICredits actually is

It's an OpenAI-compatible API gateway. You point your existing code at https://api.aicredits.in/v1 instead of https://api.openai.com/v1, swap your API key, and nothing else changes. Behind the scenes, AICredits routes your request to the right provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, Mistral, xAI, or Meta — and bills you in INR at live forex rates.

The model coverage as of March 2026: GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, o3-mini, Claude Sonnet 4, Claude 3.5 Haiku, Gemini 2.0 Flash, DeepSeek-R1, Llama 3.3 70B, Mistral Large, Grok — plus 280+ more. If you've been juggling multiple API keys and billing dashboards, a single key is genuinely useful.

Setup in 3 steps

Step 1 — Sign up: Go to aicredits.in and create an account with your email. Takes 60 seconds, no KYC for standard usage.

Step 2 — Top up via UPI: Click "Add Credits" in the dashboard. Minimum top-up is ₹100. The payment goes through Razorpay, so every Indian payment method works — UPI (GPay, PhonePe, Paytm), net banking, domestic debit and credit cards. Credits are valid for one year from top-up date.

Step 3 — Get your API key: Dashboard → API Keys → Create Key. You can set a budget cap per key here (more on that below). Copy the key — it starts with sk-.

That's it. You're live.

Switching your code from OpenAI direct

This is the part that surprised me. The migration is literally two lines:

# Before — direct OpenAI
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(api_key="sk-your-openai-key")

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4o",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain RAG in one paragraph"}]
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

# After — AICredits (everything else stays identical)
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    api_key="sk-your-aicredits-key",
    base_url="https://api.aicredits.in/v1"
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="openai/gpt-4o",   # note the provider prefix
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain RAG in one paragraph"}]
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

The only difference: base_url, api_key, and the model name now has a provider prefix.

TypeScript / Node.js is the same pattern:

import OpenAI from "openai";

const client = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: process.env.AICREDITS_API_KEY,
  baseURL: "https://api.aicredits.in/v1",
});

const response = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "openai/gpt-4o-mini",
  messages: [{ role: "user", content: "What's the capital of Rajasthan?" }],
});

console.log(response.choices[0].message.content);

Works with Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, LlamaIndex — anything that accepts a custom base URL and API key.

Switching between providers

The model name format is provider/model-id. Here are the ones I use most:

# GPT-4o
model="openai/gpt-4o"

# GPT-4o-mini (cheapest for high-volume tasks)
model="openai/gpt-4o-mini"

# Claude Sonnet 4 (best for complex reasoning)
model="anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-20250514"

# Claude 3.5 Haiku (fast, cheap Claude)
model="anthropic/claude-haiku-3-5-20241022"

# Gemini 2.0 Flash (Google, great for multimodal)
model="google/gemini-2.0-flash"

# DeepSeek R1 (strong reasoning, very cheap)
model="deepseek/deepseek-r1"

Switching models is one string change. No new API key, no new billing setup, no new SDK. For prototyping, this is huge — you can run the same prompt across four models in a loop and compare outputs in minutes.

Pricing breakdown

AICredits prices at: live forex rate + 5% forex buffer + 5% platform fee.

In practice, that's roughly a 10–11% markup over the direct USD price. Here's what that looks like with real numbers as of March 2026:

Compare this to the actual cost of accessing these APIs directly with an international card: you pay a 2–3.5% foreign transaction fee, plus the bank's mid-market spread, which is typically another 1.5–2%. That adds up to 4–5% on top of the USD price — and you still need the card. The AICredits markup is fair once you factor in what you're getting: unified billing, INR invoices, and no international card.

What actually works well

Single API key: One key, all providers. When you're building something that might switch models based on cost or capability, this removes a whole category of configuration headaches.

Automatic failover: If OpenAI is throttling or down, AICredits can route to a fallback. This isn't magic — it's not always instantaneous — but for production workloads it's better than watching your error rate spike while you update API keys.

Per-key budget controls: You create a key with a spend cap — say ₹500. When the key hits that limit, it stops working. This is genuinely useful for giving API access to teammates or to scripts you're not actively watching. No runaway cost surprises.

INR invoices: If you're billing API costs to a client or expensing them through your company's accounts, INR invoices are non-negotiable. AICredits provides them.

What to watch for

Credits expire in one year. If you top up ₹1,000 and use ₹300 over the next 13 months, you lose ₹700. Top up amounts you'll actually use.

Pricing varies with forex. The 5% forex buffer absorbs most of the day-to-day variation, but if the rupee moves significantly against the dollar, your per-token cost in INR shifts. Budget with a margin.

Model name format matters. Using gpt-4o instead of openai/gpt-4o will throw a model-not-found error. It's a 5-second fix, but it trips people up the first time.

No free tier. The minimum top-up is ₹100. That's very accessible, but it's not a free trial — you're putting money in before you see if it works. Given that the setup takes 3 minutes, this is a reasonable trade-off.

Verdict

If you're an Indian developer or a team operating without an international credit card, AICredits is the most straightforward path to accessing frontier models. The setup is faster than getting approved for a direct Anthropic or OpenAI account. The pricing is transparent. The API is drop-in compatible.

If you already have an international card and direct API access to the providers you need, the value is lower — though unified billing and automatic failover are still useful. But for the majority of Indian indie developers and small teams I know, who've been working around the billing problem with shared US accounts or Wise cards, this is just a cleaner solution.

The 10% markup is the cost of not dealing with the billing problem yourself. For most people, that's a good trade.

Sign up at aicredits.in. If you're building agents or RAG pipelines, the prompt library has copy-paste templates for the patterns that eat most of your token budget.