Cap spend by team, not by seats

← Cookbook

Set monthly ₹ budgets at every level — org, team, workspace, member and key — plus per-provider caps, so runaway usage stops itself instead of surprising you.

Hierarchical budgets (budgets, not seats)CostIntermediate10 min

BharatRouter meters real ₹, not seats — so you govern spend with budgets, not licence counts. Every level of the hierarchy carries an optional monthly cap in rupees; when a scope crosses its cap, further requests on it are refused rather than silently billed.

You'll use: hierarchical monthly budgets, managed on the dashboard and readable via the /me/budgets API. Reference: Teams & budgets.

The budget hierarchy

Caps nest from the whole org down to a single API key. A request must fit under every cap above it, so the tightest applicable budget wins.

Cap a specific provider or model

Beyond the level caps, a scoped budget limits spend on one provider or model inside a workspace — e.g. "no more than ₹5,000/month on a premium global model, unlimited on the cheap India route". A route at or over its scoped cap is skipped by the router, so traffic degrades to a cheaper model instead of failing.

Get warned before the wall

• Threshold alerts fire as a scope approaches its cap (50/80/100%), so a budget owner hears about it before requests start bouncing.
• When a cap is hit, the request returns a clear budget error — your app can queue, downgrade, or ask for a top-up instead of erroring blind.
• Budgets apply identically to humans and agents: a runaway agent loop stops at its key's cap, protecting the whole org ceiling above it.

Budgets are a governance control, not a payment method — see Billing for how spend is invoiced, and Usage to break down where the ₹ actually went.

More recipes in the Cookbook, or see the fullAPI reference.