6 teams, one opaque LLM bill: a postmortem on tagging, proxies and gateway budget caps

Fit_Program7076 · reddit · 2026-09-17

When finance asked which teams were driving the company's LLM bill, nobody could answer: six teams hit providers directly with their own API keys, and invoices arrived as one line item per provider. The author walks through three fixes: manual per-team reporting (broke down after six weeks), a lightweight proxy adding team headers (visibility but only after the money is spent), and gateway-level enforcement with per-team/per-project caps (e.g. via orqai), which blocks overspend before the request goes out and gives finance real-time spend. The open question they're wrestling with: handling burst usage when a team legitimately needs to exceed its cap. Note the post carries a promotional slant toward one vendor.

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