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Troubleshooting

Five errors cover almost everything people hit here. One check narrows any of them down in a few seconds.

Error	What it usually means
401 Invalid API key	The key is wrong, revoked, or the account is out of balance. This one does appear in your usage log, which is how you tell it apart from a path mistake.
404 on /chat/completions	Almost always the base URL. The request never reaches the gateway, so nothing shows up in your usage history at all.
Model not found	Either the model string is misspelled, or your key belongs to a group that does not carry that model.
524 timeout on long requests	A long-running request hitting an edge timeout. Which endpoint you call decides whether this can happen to you.
Unexpected token '<' in JSON	Your client received HTML where it expected JSON — almost always a URL that resolves to a web page rather than an API endpoint.

The one distinction that solves most of these

Before reading any individual page, check whether the failed request appears in your usage history at all. That single fact splits the problem in half:

• Nothing in the log — the request never reached the gateway. That is a URL problem: wrong base URL, a stray or missing /v1, or a typo in the host. The 404 is returned at the edge, which is why it leaves no trace.
• An entry in the log with an error status — the request arrived and was rejected. That is a key, group, balance or model problem, and the status code tells you which.

People lose hours to the first case because a path mistake looks exactly like a bad key from the client side. Checking the log first turns a guess into a lookup.

The base URL rule, once more

https://apiclan.us/v1 for OpenAI-lineage clients and SDKs. https://apiclan.us with no /v1 for Claude Code and the Anthropic SDK, because those append /v1/messages themselves. Per-client settings are in the base URL guide.

Keys are bound to one group

A key belongs to exactly one group, and a group carries one family of models. A key made for text models will be refused by image models even though the key itself is valid. If some models work and one does not, on the same key, that is a group boundary rather than an outage — make a second key. Which models sit in which group is on the price list.

Still stuck

Email support@apiclan.us with the model name, the base URL you configured, and whether the call shows up in your usage history. Those three facts identify almost every case immediately. General questions are answered on the FAQ.

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