Replicate

What Replicate actually meters

Replicate runs two meters, and the model decides which one you get.

Most community and private models meter wall-clock seconds of compute at the hardware's published rate. Every run creates a prediction, and Replicate charges the seconds that prediction spends actually executing.

Official models replace that with output units. FLUX 1.1 Pro charges $0.04 per output image, FLUX Schnell $3.00 per thousand output images, DeepSeek R1 $3.75 per million input tokens and $0.01 per thousand output tokens, and Wan 2.1 i2v 480p $0.09 per second of output video. Replicate named this category on 29 January 2025 and described the switch plainly: instead of being charged for the time a model runs, you're charged by output.

Two wrinkles matter. Models that call other models bill you for the root model's compute plus every downstream model it invokes, and the downstream list appears in the model's pricing section. And when Nano Banana Pro falls back to Seedream 5.0 lite under rate limiting, you pay the fallback model's price, not Nano Banana Pro's.

How credits work

Since 16 July 2025, every new Replicate account bills through prepaid credit. You buy a balance, and usage deducts from it.

Purchased credit is valid for one year from the purchase date and isn't refundable. Replicate documents no rollover concept, because the balance is simply money you've already spent.

Auto reload tops the balance back up when it drops past a threshold you set. The minimum threshold is $5 and the minimum reload balance is $15, and Replicate's own example is a $10 threshold with a $50 reload, which adds $40 when you hit $10. If your balance already sits at or below the threshold when you save, the reload fires immediately.

Accounts created before 16 July 2025 can stay on monthly arrears billing, where Replicate charges the previous month's usage at the start of the next one. Replicate says it intends to migrate most accounts to prepaid eventually. Credit is account-scoped, and organizations get a shared balance rather than pooling individual ones.

What happens when you hit the limit

Replicate throttles you before it stops you. As your credit balance approaches zero, it applies progressively stronger rate limits so you have time to top up rather than getting cut off without warning. The docs recommend keeping the balance above $20 via auto reload.

At zero, Replicate prevents new work from starting and shuts down any infrastructure running for you. A prediction can occasionally run past the balance, and Replicate charges the outstanding amount to your default payment method at month end.

Normal rate limits sit at 600 prediction creations a minute and 3,000 requests a minute elsewhere, with short bursts allowed. Accounts holding granted credit with no payment method on file get 1 request per second and 6 a minute. Predictions time out at 30 minutes.