Budget Firewall

Hard caps per project. No surprise invoices.

How it works

Every request passes through the Budget Firewall before reaching the LLM. If the project budget is exceeded, the request is blocked and a 429 is returned. No tokens consumed. No cost incurred.

Set a budget

In the dashboard: Projects → Your project → Budget

Or via API:

curl -X PATCH https://api.gatectr.com/v1/budget \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GATECTR_API_KEY" \
  -d '{ "project_id": "proj_123", "limit_tokens": 100000, "period": "day" }'

Budget types

Type	Description
tokens	Cap on total tokens (prompt + completion)
cost_usd	Cap on estimated USD cost

Periods

Period	Resets
day	Midnight UTC
month	1st of the month UTC
total	Never — lifetime cap

Soft alerts

Set a threshold to receive a webhook before the hard cap is hit:

{
  "limit_tokens": 100000,
  "alert_at_percent": 80
}

At 80% usage, GateCtr fires a budget.threshold_reached webhook event.

Blocked request response

{
  "error": {
    "type": "budget_exceeded",
    "message": "Request blocked. Budget limit reached.",
    "project_id": "proj_123",
    "limit": 100000,
    "used": 100012
  }
}

HTTP status: 429 Too Many Requests

Available on

Free plan and above.