New Gateway Signups No Longer Start at Zero

This is a bug fix, not a new feature — and it's worth being precise about what was actually broken.

What was broken

The AI Gateway's customer-facing credit ledger (the one behind gateway.piskes.com, separate from the platform's internal one) had no fallback for a brand-new account with no balance row at all. The gateway checks credit balance with a conditional update — "subtract this cost, but only if the balance can cover it" — and that check has no way to succeed against a row that was never created. The practical effect: a new customer's very first request always failed with an "insufficient credits" error, regardless of how cheap that request actually was. Even a request against a genuinely free model failed the same way, because the failure had nothing to do with the price — it was about the row not existing yet.

This also directly contradicted the Gateway Portal's own dashboard copy, which told customers that requests against their own provider key still go through.

What's fixed

New gateway accounts now get a one-time welcome credit grant automatically on their first request, the same mechanism the platform's internal credit ledger already had — mirrored onto this separate, external ledger rather than assumed to already cover it. It's granted exactly once per account, so it can't be triggered repeatedly.

What's still a known edge case

Bringing your own provider key (BYOK) does not skip credit reservation entirely — it's charged a small fee (5% of what the request would otherwise cost) rather than being free. The welcome grant comfortably covers that fee for a new account. But once that welcome grant is fully spent, a BYOK request on an account with a genuinely zero balance will still be refused the same way a non-BYOK request would. If you're relying on BYOK to keep requests flowing indefinitely on a $0 balance, that assumption doesn't hold today — worth knowing if your account has been active for a while and you start seeing credit errors again.