OpenRouter Cost Controls

Overview

OpenRouter provides per-key credit limits, a credit balance API, and per-generation cost queries. Combined with client-side budget middleware, you can enforce hard spending caps at the key level and soft caps in your application. This skill covers key-level limits, per-request cost tracking, budget enforcement middleware, and alert systems.

Prerequisites

• An OpenRouter API key (sk-or-v1-...) exported as OPENROUTER_API_KEY — see the openrouter-install-auth skill for setup
• Python 3.8+ with the OpenAI SDK and requests; Node.js 18+ for the TypeScript per-request cost logger in the references
• curl, jq, and bc for the balance check and the Budget Alert Script
• An OpenRouter management key exported as OPENROUTER_MGMT_KEY if you provision per-key credit limits via POST /api/v1/keys

Instructions