I am filing a formal complaint and requesting a full refund of my AI Gateway credit purchase to the original payment method.

I purchased credits specifically to use anthropic/claude-opus-5 after encountering free-tier access restrictions. Payment was completed, and the API confirmed a positive credit balance. Nevertheless, the service continued to reject ordinary, small inference requests with:

HTTP 429 — No access to this model at this time.

This is an unacceptable experience for a paid service. Considerable engineering time has already been spent investigating a failure that remains unexplained.

We have completed extensive troubleshooting:

• Tested both the original key and a newly created key from the same funded team.
• Reproduced failures using the official Vercel AI SDK, Chat Completions API, and Anthropic Messages API.
• Tested from separate local and server networks.
• Tested default routing, explicit provider selection, regional routing, and minimal requests.
• Most recently, restricted requests strictly to Anthropic using only: ["anthropic"]. Three consecutive requests returned 200, 429, and 429. Response metadata confirmed that no alternative providers were enabled.

Representative failed generations:

• gen_01M2Z7V5EENANBRK11S91B6QNV — September 20, 2026, 11:04:56 UTC.
• gen_01M2Z9TGXHG81D96DPE5QQ5PKE — September 20, 2026, 11:39:32 UTC.
• gen_01M2Z9TJ2X7D3HW9TJTNDD62Z9 — September 20, 2026, 11:39:34 UTC.

These failures reported zero provider attempts and no Retry-After header. Your dashboard showed the first request finishing in 0.06 seconds, with no usage, zero cost, and unavailable routing details.

Your rate-limit documentation states that paid-tier requests are not rate-limited by AI Gateway, while upstream provider limits may still apply. That distinction does not explain these requests being rejected with zero recorded provider attempts. Occasional successful responses do not establish dependable access.

I require the following:

1. A full refund to the original payment method, with written confirmation of the amount and processing timeline. Additional platform credits are not an acceptable substitute.
2. A specific technical explanation identifying the restriction responsible for these failures, including why they occurred after payment and why no actionable retry information was supplied.
3. Escalation to both the AI Gateway engineering team and the billing team. Please review the supplied request IDs before asking me to repeat troubleshooting already completed.

Please acknowledge this complaint within two business days and provide a substantive response and refund decision within five business days. If you refuse the refund, provide the specific policy basis and an explanation addressing the documented service failures.

I expect a concrete explanation and prompt handling of this refund request.

Regards, Shawn