API Bill Circuit Breaker

A hard spending fuse for your LLM API keys that trips and alerts before the bill explodes

Problem

A developer used a Gemini key in a Google App Script during a hackathon and within a day the bill shot past $2,500, with Google charging the card every 30 minutes and support slow to respond. Individual devs and hackathon teams routinely paste keys into scripts, frontends and third-party tools with zero spend guardrails, so a single leak turns into a catastrophic invoice.

Solution

A lightweight proxy gateway/SDK: route model calls through your own endpoint, set per-key and per-project daily/hourly budget caps plus rate limits, and auto-block calls with email/IM alerts when thresholds trip. Logs show source IP and User-Agent to pinpoint where the leak came from, plus a one-click key freeze.

Users

Solo developers, hackathon teams, small SaaS founders, anyone handing keys to contractors

MVP

Single reverse-proxy endpoint compatible with major model APIs; per-key daily/monthly budgets and rate caps; 429 plus alert when over limit; call log showing source IP and anomaly patterns; one-click key pause

Revenue

Usage-based or per-project subscription (free for one key, paid for multi-key/project, extra alert channels and log retention); offer a self-hosted buyout license

Why now

AI API keys are increasingly pasted into scripts, frontends and third-party tools while cloud providers default to uncapped billing; real overcharge stories already exist in the community, and a proxy gateway is a few weeks of solo work