NanoGPT review: subscription limits, pricing, is it safe?

This page is built from NanoGPT's own site, docs, terms, privacy and refund policies, blog, status page and GitHub organisation, the official price pages of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, Trustpilot reviews, Reddit threads read through snapshot mirrors, GitHub issues and Hacker News, all checked on October 21, 2026. NanoGPT's claims are labelled as its own.

According to AICPB's traffic rankings, nano-gpt.com had 1.3 million visits in September 2026, up 92.5% on August: 6th among AI model routers.

NanoGPT (nano-gpt.com) is a different project from nanoGPT, Andrej Karpathy's open-source code for training small GPT models.

What NanoGPT sells

NanoGPT is a pay-per-prompt service with a web chat and an API. Its public model list held 668 entries on October 21, 2026, including Claude, GPT and Gemini models, open-weight models such as DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.3, Kimi K3 and Qwen, uncensored variants of some open models, and image, video, speech, music and embedding models. Open-weight models are served by many third-party hosts and brokers named in its terms, such as Novita, Baseten, Cerebras, Fireworks, Phala and Gonka24, so the same model can come from different hosts.

You can use the web app without an account. Deposits start at 0.10 USD in crypto or 1 USD by card, with no deposit fees. Crypto runs through BTCPay Server and Nanswap and covers Nano, Bitcoin on-chain and Lightning, Monero, USDT, USDC, ETH, SOL and others; NanoGPT's own stats put Monero at 44.02% of crypto deposit value in September 2026.

The PRO plan costs 12 USD a month. It includes 60 million input tokens a week on included open-weight models (331 models carried the flag on October 21, 2026), 100 images a day and 5% off eligible paid text models. Claude and GPT are not included. NanoGPT's terms limit subscriptions to "personal, non-commercial use"; pay-as-you-go may be used commercially, including resale, subject to each model maker's terms.

Prices against the official APIs

NanoGPT's pricing page says "GPT-5.5 costs $5/$30 per million tokens at OpenAI, and exactly $5/$30 here", and each response states the exact cost charged. Its model list matches list prices for the models checked:

Two opt-in exceptions cost more. Pinning a provider adds 5% ("normally 5%" in the docs) and turns the request into pay-as-you-go even for subscribers; bring-your-own-key requests are billed at 5% of the normal model cost. A card chargeback costs a 20 USD fee on top of the disputed amount.

What public tests show

No third-party latency, throughput or output-quality benchmark of NanoGPT was found in public sources. What exists:

• NanoGPT's own usage analysis (February 15, 2026) found the top 1% to 5% of subscribers used over half of all tokens, and said growth was causing slower responses, more 429 errors and fallback to pricier providers. It then capped the plan at 60 million input tokens a week, 10 concurrent requests and a burst of 10 requests per 10 seconds from February 17, and paused new subscriptions on March 1, 2026, citing growth and thousands of fraudulent card attempts.
• A Reddit r/SillyTavernAI user (February 2026) found GLM 5 through NanoGPT's subscription providers inconsistent and switched to Z.ai's own API despite the cost. One impression, no measurements.
• A GitHub issue in HerikaServer (October 21, 2026) shows a game-AI connector silently sending provider.order, so requests were billed pay-as-you-go instead of from the subscription.

What users report

Trustpilot shows 3.0 out of 5 from 13 reviews (October 21, 2026); the profile is unclaimed and has no company replies. Praise covers the model range, quick addition of new models, privacy, low prices, the earlier 8 USD plan and fast support. Complaints cover failing tool calls and timeouts in agent work (August and September 2026), a slow API, and one unresolved balance dispute (a 30 USD top-up credited as 20 USD). An October 16, 2026 reviewer said failed tool calls cost money, then raised the rating to three stars after a refund.

On r/SillyTavernAI, NanoGPT is a main budget option for roleplay. Most commenters on the February 2026 cap said 60 million input tokens a week is plenty unless contexts are huge; one was locked out for days. NanoGPT's operator said there that subscription routing prefers FP8 hosts and avoids FP4 hosts for most models. A competitor, Standard Compute, reported the plan price rising from 8 USD to 12 USD for renewals from May 12, 2026, citing NanoGPT's update. Hacker News mentions since 2024 are scattered and positive.

MCP, Agent Skills and coding agents

NanoGPT publishes an official MCP server, @nanogpt/mcp, open source on GitHub. It runs locally through npx with your API key, and gives Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Cline, Claude Desktop and other MCP clients tools for chat, vision, embeddings, image generation and editing, video, 3D, speech, music, transcription, web search, scraping, social and maps data, and the account balance. Model-list tools are free. Video and 3D jobs are charged on submission and can be polled, so the docs warn against resubmitting.

On the API side, the Responses endpoint has a hosted tool-search pilot for large function catalogues and accepts MCP call items when replaying a conversation, but passing a remote MCP server as a tool is not documented. No official Agent Skills were found in its docs or GitHub organisation, and Anthropic's Skills API is not documented on its Messages endpoint.

Its docs have guides for Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Cline, Roo Code, Kilo Code, OpenCode, Gemini CLI (through an OpenRouter-compatible fork), Grok CLI, OpenHands, Droid and OpenClaw, plus SillyTavern, JanitorAI and other chat front ends. The Claude Code guide sets ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to https://nano-gpt.com/api/v1 and can map Claude Code's model slots to non-Claude models such as openai/gpt-6.1-sol. The API covers Chat Completions, Responses, Anthropic Messages with token counting, a Batch API for all three, prompt caching and web search. There is a Vercel AI SDK provider (@nanogpt/ai-sdk-provider, which calls itself a community provider) and an llms.txt index.

Privacy, terms and who runs it

The terms (updated October 20, 2026) name NanoGPT LLC, a U.S. limited liability company, under California law with individual arbitration; they give no state of formation, address or officers. A podcast listing names Milan de Reede as a co-creator. The domain was registered on October 19, 2023.

• By default NanoGPT does not store prompts or conversations on its servers; web chat history stays in the browser. API request logging (1 to 30 days, encrypted) and Responses storage are opt-in.
• NanoGPT says it does not train on, sell or advertise with content, and does not send account names, emails or IPs to providers; on OpenAI routes it sends a stable hashed identifier.
• Optional PII redaction and TEE "Private Mode" routes with attestation exist. Upstream hosts keep data under their own policies; the privacy policy lists retention per provider, and some, such as Gonka24, have no fixed period. No SOC 2 or ISO certification is named.
• The refund policy (updated September 27, 2026) approves good-faith requests by default, with exceptions for abuse or heavy use.
• The status page watches only the website and Zano deposits; its incident feed was empty on October 21, 2026.

How it compares with other relays

OpenRouter also bills at list prices but adds 5.5% on credit purchases and has a 5 USD minimum. Chutes, which hosts open models itself, sells a 10 USD a month plan with 2,000 requests a day. ZenMux charges list prices with its 5% top-up fee waived for now, and AIMLAPI about 1.3 times list. NanoGPT's edge is tiny crypto deposits, no account and privacy defaults.

Who should skip it

Teams that need dependable tool calling for agents, an SLA or certifications, or a supplier with a fully disclosed company behind it. For private chat and roleplay on a budget, the main risks are which host serves your model and how often the plan's terms change.