Together AI 402 Payment Required: "balance has reached its spend cut-off"

What does the error mean?

Together’s error codes page gives the cause of 402 - Payment Required as: Your organization's balance has reached its spend cut-off ($0 for prepaid accounts), or the model requires a positive credit balance.

Without a sales contract, your account runs on prepaid credits and the cut-off is $0. Metering runs a little behind, so some usage can land after the balance hits zero. You still owe that, which is why Together says the cut-off isn’t an exact spending cap.

How do you fix it?

1. Open billing settings.
2. In the Credit balance card, select Add credits, enter an amount and confirm. It’s charged to your default payment method.
3. Give it time. Together says to wait up to 5 minutes for the balance to update before you retry. A purchase can take up to 15 minutes to finish.
4. Don’t re-enter your card while a payment is processing. That can create duplicate purchases.
5. Retry the requests.

Card payments usually show up within moments. A US bank (ACH) payment usually takes 1 to 3 business days to clear, and no credits arrive until it does.

How do you keep it from coming back?

Turn on auto-recharge. In billing settings, open the Auto-recharge panel, select Set thresholds, then fill in When balance goes below and Bring credit balance up to. Each recharge is one charge to your default payment method.

That default has to be a credit or debit card. Setting a US bank account as default turns auto-recharge off, even with a card saved. A threshold above your current balance triggers a purchase straight away.

Pick the threshold from your burn rate. Together notes that higher-throughput workloads need a bigger buffer between a recharge and running dry.

Budgets and spend alerts aren’t available to configure yet, so use the billing usage API if you want your own alerts. And keep the card healthy, since it’s what keeps recharges going. ernd is a card for AI spend with 4% back on AI vendor bills.