> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.verlon.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Units

> What a unit is, what counts against your plan, and how non-token work converts

## What is a unit

A **unit is a token processed through the gateway** — input and
output, on any model, including requests routed to your own endpoints.
Units measure how much work Verlon does for you; they decide which
[plan](/platform/plans) fits your usage and nothing else. There is no
per-unit price and no overage billing.

For a sense of scale: **250M units a month is roughly what a
Sonnet-based product with a few thousand monthly users burns.**

## What counts

| Traffic                                                                 | Counts?         | Why                                                                          |
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Requests that reach a model (input + output tokens)                     | **Yes**         | The work you asked for                                                       |
| Requests routed to your own endpoints                                   | **Yes**         | We still did the routing, tracing, and judging work                          |
| Refusals and content-filtered responses                                 | **Yes**         | The model ran; tokens were consumed                                          |
| Provider-side cache reads                                               | No              | Cheap replayed context — excluding it rewards behaviour that saves you money |
| Client errors that never reached a model                                | No              | Nothing was served                                                           |
| Failed requests where nothing succeeded                                 | No              | We never bill for an outage                                                  |
| Retries and fallbacks                                                   | Counts **once** | A request that fails upstream and succeeds on a fallback is one request      |
| Verlon's own verification traffic (quality judging, shadow comparisons) | No              | Our cost, absorbed into the subscription                                     |
| Dashboard actions, key management, MCP configuration, health checks     | No              | Not model traffic                                                            |

The principle: **we count work you asked for and received.**
Reliability retries, proof machinery, and provider caching are ours to
absorb.

## Non-token work

Some providers report no tokens at all — image generation,
text-to-speech, video. Those convert to units at cost parity:
\*\*$1 of provider cost ≈ 200,000 units** (about $5 per million units,
a blended mid-market token price). Models that report real token usage
for media (like `gpt-image-1`) meter on their actual tokens instead.

| Work                                      | Approximate units |
| ----------------------------------------- | ----------------- |
| One 1024×1024 image at \$0.04             | \~8,000           |
| One second of generated video at \~\$0.35 | \~70,000          |
| One minute of standard TTS audio          | \~3,000–6,000     |

These equivalents follow the single published anchor above; if the
anchor ever changes, this table changes with it.

## Watching your usage

The dashboard sidebar shows your units this period against your plan's
allowance, and Settings → Billing carries the same meter. The API
surface is `GET /v3/usage/units`:

```json theme={null}
{
  "tier": "pro",
  "ceilingUnits": 250000000,
  "period": { "start": "2026-07-19", "end": "2026-08-19", "units": 1055682, "pctUsed": 0.4 },
  "rolling30d": { "units": 2238601 },
  "platformTrafficPaused": false
}
```

Going over your allowance never blocks anything — see
[what happens if you go over](/platform/plans#what-happens-if-you-go-over).