Claude Code on a Relay365 API relay: an hour of setup

What an hour of checking gives you before a month of Claude Code

This is a duty-desk article from the Relay365 desk, written for one narrow job: you want to run Claude Code for a month on pay-as-you-go, and you want the budget pinned to Claude Fable 5 rates. Relay365 is an independent third-party relay, run like a round-the-clock duty desk, and the way to trust a new account is not to read a long story but to spend the first hour verifying things yourself. So here is a checklist, in the order the desk would walk it.

Start with the client, because it decides everything downstream. Claude models on Relay365 work only from the official Claude Code and Claude Desktop clients, Claude Code 2.1.285 or newer. They do not work from Cursor, Cherry Studio, Cline, OpenCode, any SDK or cURL. If you reach for one of those, you want a different lane entirely: GPT, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Qwen, Grok, MiniMax and Hunyuan pair with those clients. Keep that split in your head and the first hour goes smoothly.

Then confirm the wire name your code will send. Claude Fable 5 travels as claude-fable-5, and that is the string your requests should carry. Write it into your config once, and every later request on the Relay365 table can be traced back to it.

The rates that set your month, and how they sit against list price

Relay365 prices the four token types separately: input, output, cache write and cache read. That separation is the whole budgeting tool, because Claude Code sessions lean on all four. For Claude Fable 5 the rates per 1 million tokens are input $3.79, output $18.94, cache write $4.66 and cache read $0.2917. The official list price is input $10, output $50, so the Relay365 output rate is about 38% of official. That is the number to keep in view while you plan the month.

Here is a worked example, plainly an example: if you send 2,000,000 input tokens and 400,000 output tokens a day on Claude Fable 5, that is 2 x $3.79 plus 0.4 x $18.94, which is $7.58 plus $7.576, about $15.16 a day. Over 30 days that example lands near $455, before any cache traffic. If your sessions also write and read cache, add cache write at $4.66 and cache read at $0.2917 per 1 million tokens for the exact counts the upstream reports. Do the same sum with your own numbers and you have a budget rather than a guess.

Two neighbouring lanes are worth knowing in the same breath. Claude Fable 5.1 (claude-fable-5-1) is input $4.00, output $20.01, cache write $4.93, cache read $0.3083, and its output rate is about 40% of official against the same official input $10, output $50. Claude Haiku 4.5 (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001) is input $0.3542, output $1.70, cache write $0.425, cache read $0.0278, about 34% of official on output against official input $1, output $5. The desk mentions them only so you can see the shape of the table; the pricing page carries the full list.

How billing actually settles each call

Relay365 runs on a prepaid wallet with no monthly fee, and every call is settled on the token counts the upstream reports. That means your usage log and your ledger should agree, line by line. A call that fails upstream, a 502 or a 503, is not billed at all. A disconnected stream is billed for what was actually used, nothing more and nothing invented. Read two or three rows of the log in your first hour and you will see exactly this behaviour.

The usage log holds the latest 200 requests, showing the time, model, input, output, cache recall, charge and result of each call. It does not show which key made the call, so if you run more than one key, tag them in the dashboard and keep your own note of which job uses which tag. The dashboard also gives you quick-wiring snippets and a ledger of wallet, bounty and pass accounts, plus in-site messages to the desk once you are logged in.

First-hour checks that catch surprises early

Send one short request from Claude Code and confirm it returns, then send one longer one and watch the four token counts land in the usage log. Check the charge against the Claude Fable 5 rates you wrote down. Try a cached exchange and confirm cache write and cache read appear as their own lines rather than being folded into input.

Push a little traffic to see where the limits sit. Relay365 returns HTTP 429 when one key goes above 120 calls in 60 seconds, or when one account has more than 8 requests in flight. Knowing those two numbers before a busy day means a 429 tells you something useful instead of surprising you.

Top up only what the month needs, and note the refund rule while the amount is fresh in your mind: within 14 days of a top-up, unused balance can be refunded minus what was consumed and the payment channel's fees. Bounty and promotional credit are not refundable. A new account also starts with $0.25 of signup credit, which is a convenient way to fund the very checks in this article.

When a duty pass beats the wallet for a heavy month

Duty passes are optional and cover Claude and GPT only; every other model always uses the wallet. A pass comes with a dedicated key that never touches the wallet, which keeps your pass traffic and your wallet traffic cleanly apart. Two Claude passes show the range. The Claude 30 days $1400 pass with a $450 per week cap costs $94.03 for 30 days and draws $1400 of official-price quota at official price x2.5, about $560 of official-priced usage, with at most $450 of quota per 7 days. The Claude 30 days $6000 pass with no weekly cap costs $506.53 for 30 days and draws $6000 of official-price quota at official price x2.5, about $2400 of official-priced usage, with no weekly ceiling.

Compare those with your wallet arithmetic from earlier. If your month looks like the $455 example on Claude Fable 5, the wallet keeps things simple and fully pay-as-you-go. If your usage is heavier and steadier, the pass math is worth an hour of its own. Either way, Relay365 shows the same four token types and the same usage log, so the comparison is fair.

The desk is on the table all month

What makes Relay365 easy to live with is that every lane sits on one table, every request can be traced in the usage log, and the four token types are priced separately so nothing hides inside a blended figure. The referral programme is there too, paying 18% at level 1 and 6% at level 2 of what referred members pay, withdrawable from $11.11 or movable into the wallet. Six interface languages and in-site messages round out the desk.

Run the checks above in your first hour, keep your Claude Code 2.1.285-or-newer client pointed at claude-fable-5, and a month of budgeted work is in front of you. Create a Relay365 account and start the hour now.