Combined keys: stack your subscriptions into one credential
On an Unlimited subscription, the thing you’re actually shaping isn’t tokens — it’s capacity over time. Each subscription gives you a daily coverage window (the 8-hour blocks you reserve) and, within it, some number of requests you can run in parallel. Your real capacity is those two dimensions multiplied: parallel slots × hours.
Most people grow along both axes. You buy a second block to cover more of the day, or a second subscription to run more requests at once during your busy hours. The awkward part used to be the bookkeeping: every subscription minted its own key, so a serious setup meant three or four keys, each live at different times, each with its own capacity — and you juggling which one to paste where.
Combined keys remove the juggling. A combined key (it looks like sk-ci-meta-…) folds two or more of your subscriptions into a single credential, and it behaves like the union of everything underneath it.
Two rules, and that’s it
Section titled “Two rules, and that’s it”Coverage adds up. A combined key is live whenever any of its subscriptions has an open window. Reserve the Europe block on one subscription and the Americas block on another, combine them, and the one key covers both stretches of the day.
Overlap stacks parallel capacity. Where two subscriptions cover the same hour, their parallel slots add together. That’s the lever for concurrency: if you need to run more requests side by side during your peak hours, buy a second subscription over those hours and combine it in.
A concrete example. Say you hold one full-day (24h) subscription and add a second subscription on just the Europe block. The combined key gives you:
- Double the parallel capacity during the Europe hours — the two subscriptions overlap there, so their slots stack.
- Baseline capacity the rest of the day — only the 24h subscription is covering those hours.
Coverage is 24/7 (from the full-day subscription); parallel capacity is shaped to peak exactly when you work.
Allowances stay separate
Section titled “Allowances stay separate”Combining is about capacity, not billing. Each subscription keeps its own monthly allowance and its own renewal date — nothing is pooled or co-mingled. The practical upside is resilience: if one subscription lapses or you let it cancel, it simply drops out of the union. The combined key keeps working with whatever subscriptions remain — no dead key, no scramble to re-issue credentials.
It works across pools
Section titled “It works across pools”Requests route by the model you ask for. So a combined key can span subscriptions on different pools — a Core Pool subscription and a Frontier Pool subscription under one key — and each request lands wherever its model lives. Ask for deepseek-v4-flash and it’s served from your Core subscription; ask for kimi-k2.7 and it’s served from your Frontier one. GET /v1/models on a combined key lists every model you can reach across all of them.
One credential per subscription
Section titled “One credential per subscription”Combining a subscription into a key removes that subscription’s standalone key — each subscription has exactly one credential at a time. That’s deliberate: it means there’s never ambiguity about what capacity a given key carries. A key’s coverage and parallel capacity are always the exact sum of the subscriptions it holds, nothing more, nothing hidden. The dashboard walks you through it when you combine.
Creating one
Section titled “Creating one”In the Keys page, choose Create API Key and multi-select the subscriptions you want to combine. Before you commit, a preview shows the resulting daily coverage and peak parallel capacity, so you can see the shape you’re buying into. Prefer the API? The Management API does the same thing programmatically.
Full walkthrough in the combined keys guide. If you’re still deciding which blocks to reserve, the live menu and per-block prices are on the pools page.
CheapestInference serves frontier open-weights models — Kimi K2.7, Kimi K2.6, GLM 5.2, MiniMax M3 (Frontier Pool) and DeepSeek V4 Flash, MiMo v2.5 (Core Pool) — through one OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible API on unlimited time-block subscriptions. See the pools or get started.