Poe API pricing: points, models, Claude Code and limits

This page is built from Poe's API docs, public model list, plan page, privacy policy and terms, Anthropic's price page, TechCrunch's launch report, two price trackers, Trustpilot reviews and community threads, all checked on October 21, 2026. Poe's claims are labelled as its own.

What Poe API sells

Poe is Quora's chat app for many AI models. Since July 31, 2025, the same bots can be called by API: OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions and Responses at https://api.poe.com/v1, and Anthropic-compatible Messages at https://api.poe.com for official Claude bots only. There is no separate API bill. Calls spend the compute points that come with a Poe subscription, and you can buy add-on points when they run out.

The public model list had 323 entries on October 21, 2026. By listed owner, the largest groups were EmpirioLabs AI (89), fal (58), Novita AI (36), OpenAI (24) and Google (19). It includes Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5, the GPT-5.4 family, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Grok 4.7, DeepSeek V4 Pro, and media bots such as Veo 3.1, Kling 3.0, Seedance 2.0, Runway Gen-4.5 and FLUX.2. Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 models and Gemini 4 Argon were not in the list. Many open models are copies run by other hosts, marked with suffixes for DeepInfra, Together and Novita AI. Private bots are not available by API.

Prices against the official APIs

Poe says it intends to charge the same as the underlying model providers. Its model list carries a per-token price field; Poe does not document the unit, but the values match US dollars per token. Read that way:

Poe prices come from its public model list, Anthropic's from its pricing page. Current Claude bots cost about 1% more than Anthropic's list and older ones about 14% less. 147 of the 323 bots, mostly image, video and community bots, have no per-token price and are charged in points per message or per output.

What a point costs depends on how you buy it. Add-on points cost about 30 USD per million and last a year, per Metronome's pricing index and TechCrunch. Poe's plan page listed yearly plans at 49.99 USD (10,000 points a day), 199.99 USD (660,000 a month), 499.99 USD (1.65 million), 999.99 USD (3.3 million) and 2,499.99 USD (8.25 million). At the API's launch the same paid tiers gave 1, 2.5, 5 and 12.5 million points a month, so allowances fell by about a third at the same prices. Monthly points do not roll over, and Poe's terms make points non-refundable.

What public tests show

No third-party benchmark of the Poe API's latency, throughput or uptime has been published. What exists is price arithmetic:

• Omid Saffari (checked against Poe's plan page on August 17, 2026) worked out about 30.29 to 30.30 USD per million points on monthly pooled plans and 25.25 USD on yearly plans, with no volume discount. The 4.99 USD daily plan is cheapest per point only if you use it fully every day.
• UsagePricing captured Poe's plan page on July 28, 2026 showing the 19.99 USD Premium plan at 660,000 points a month, down from a reported 1 million: about 34% fewer points.
• Whizi, a competing multi-model chat service, read Poe's rate cards in September 2026 and estimated about 600 points for a GPT-5.5 answer of 1,000 tokens in and 500 out. A competitor's estimate, with no usage logged.
• aiunpacking.com estimated in May 2026 that a video clip costs 5,000 to 20,000 points. Estimates, with no method shown.

What users report

Poe scores 1.9 out of 5 from 63 reviews on Trustpilot. The 2026 reviews are mostly about points: one reviewer was charged nearly 1 USD in points for a gpt-5-pro query that returned nothing (September 27), another said points "evaporate fast" (September 12), and another lost points on a failed 3D generation (August 29). In a Reddit r/SillyTavernAI thread (archived February 2026), a reply explained how to use Poe points through SillyTavern's custom OpenAI-compatible option and said few people do. aiunpacking.com reports anger on r/PoeAI after free daily points reportedly fell from about 3,000 to 300 around March 30, 2026.

MCP, Agent Skills and coding agents

• MCP: No official MCP server found in Poe's docs, and the API docs do not mention passing MCP servers or tools in a request. Community-built MCP servers that call Poe are listed on directories such as mcp.so.
• Agent Skills: No official Agent Skills found, and the Anthropic-compatible docs do not mention Anthropic's Skills API.
• Coding agents: Poe's Claude Code guide sets ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to https://api.poe.com, puts the Poe key in ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN and leaves ANTHROPIC_API_KEY empty. It maps Claude Code's sonnet, opus and haiku aliases to Claude Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.5 and Haiku 3.5, so name a newer model if you want one. Poe's interface guide covers Cline, Roo Code and the LLM command-line tool; its changelog names Cursor and Continue. The poe-platform GitHub organization, which hosts Poe's fastapi_poe library, also publishes poe-code, an MIT-licensed CLI that configures Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Goose to use the Poe API. Poe's API docs do not mention it.
• API formats: Tool calling works, but the strict flag is ignored, so tool-call JSON is not checked against your schema. response_format, seed, penalties and audio input are silently ignored, n must be 1, and the docs contradict themselves on structured outputs: the Chat Completions section says no, the Responses section says yes through text.format. The Responses format adds a web_search_preview tool. No Gemini-native format or batch API is documented.
• SDKs: Poe's examples use the OpenAI Python and Node.js SDKs, and Poe recommends its own fastapi-poe library for new integrations. A Usage API reports the balance and 30 days of points history.

Privacy, terms and who runs it

Poe is run by Quora, Inc., which its privacy policy names as data controller. Chats and uploaded files are shared with the bots' model providers and developers, and developers who build bots through APIs "may view and store your chats on their servers to train their models". The policy, last updated April 30, 2026, states no retention periods and describes no zero-data-retention or data-region options. Poe's terms (updated March 19, 2026) let Quora suspend or end accounts "at any time for any reason". The API allows 500 requests per minute per user, more on request. No official status page was found; Stacksheriff, which checks the website from outside, showed about 93.3% uptime over 90 days.

How it compares with OpenRouter, NanoGPT and Kie.ai

• OpenRouter bills each provider's list price and adds a 5.5% fee on credit purchases, but it routes between hosts, falls back when one fails and filters by data policy. Poe has none of that.
• NanoGPT charges the makers' list prices per prompt with no subscription, and its 12 USD-a-month PRO plan covers open-weight models up to 60 million input tokens a week.
• Kie.ai lists Claude below Anthropic's price but does not say how it gets access. Poe's Claude prices sit at or near Anthropic's list.

Who should skip it

Skip the Poe API for production apps: points are non-refundable, allowances have shrunk at unchanged prices, there is no fallback or status page, and the privacy policy lets bot developers keep chats. It makes sense if you already pay for Poe and want to spend unused points in Claude Code, Cline or a chat front-end.