Budgets & Spend Guards

Routero makes AI spend governable without making it slow. Budgets attach to any entity — workspace, team, user, API key, or route — and enforce three tiers of response when a ceiling is approached.

“Warn early. Throttle smart. Block only when you mean it.”

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Three enforcement tiers

Tier	Trigger	Effect
Warn	80% of ceiling	Slack/email alert to workspace owner; traffic unaffected
Throttle	100% of ceiling	Auto-swap to a cost-optimised route (smart/cheap); requests still succeed
Block	Hard cap reached	Returns HTTP 429 with structured error and X-Routero-Budget-Reset-At header

All three tiers are configurable — you choose which to enable and at what thresholds.

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Budget scope

Budgets can be attached to:

Entity	Example use case
Workspace	Total monthly ceiling across all teams
Team	Per-team chargeback with independent limits
User / API key	Per-developer or per-application limit
Route	Limit spend on a specific model group
Customer	Per-end-user spend cap in multi-tenant SaaS

One workspace can have multiple overlapping budgets. The most restrictive applicable budget wins.

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Creating a budget

Via the API:

curl -X POST https://api.routero.ai/budget/new \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ROUTERO_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "max_budget": 500.00,
    "budget_duration": "1mo",
    "soft_budget": 400.00,
    "model_max_budget": {
      "openai/gpt-4o": 200.00
    }
  }'

Or from the dashboard under Budgets → New Budget.

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Chargeback and cost attribution

Every request writes a spend event with full attribution: workspace, team, user key, route, model, provider, token counts, and cost in USD. Attribution latency: under 5 minutes from request completion to ledger entry.

Export options:

• Dashboard — real-time spend dashboard with team-level breakdown
• CSV — monthly export per workspace
• REST API — /billing/daily-spend, /billing/spend-trend, /billing/transactions
• Data warehouse — Snowflake or BigQuery hourly sync
• ERP push — NetSuite or Coupa integration

→ Cost Tracking & Billing for the full spend pipeline.