Cost & Spend Tracking

How OmniRoute estimates, records, and reports the cost of every request — and why the dashboard number is a savings tracker, not a bill.

See also: User Guide · Features Gallery

What it is (and what it is not)

OmniRoute attributes a per-request USD cost to every completion by multiplying token counts by a model's pricing rates. These numbers power the Costs dashboard, the omniroute cost / omniroute usage CLI, CSV/JSON exports, and per-API-key budgets.

The dashboard "cost" is a savings tracker, not a bill. OmniRoute never charges you — it routes your requests to providers you have already connected (your own subscriptions, free tiers, and API keys). A "$290 total cost" accrued entirely on free models means roughly $290 you did not pay a paid API. The figure is an estimate of what the same traffic would have cost at standard list prices, so you can see where your usage is concentrated and how much routing to cheaper/free providers is saving you.

This framing is stated directly in the project README ("the dashboard 'cost' is a savings tracker, not a bill").

Because the number is an estimate:

• It depends on the pricing table OmniRoute has for each model. A model with no pricing entry contributes 0 cost (it shows as a "Legacy / Free" row in the explorer).
• Free-tier and subscription traffic still accrues an estimated cost — that is the amount you are saving, not an amount owed.

How costs are estimated

The pricing source

Costs come from a pricing table resolved in this precedence order (src/lib/pricingSync.ts):

1. User overrides — prices you set in the dashboard / via PATCH /api/pricing.
2. Synced external pricing — fetched from LiteLLM's public model_prices_and_context_window.json when sync is enabled (stored in a separate pricing_synced namespace so it never clobbers your overrides).
3. Hardcoded defaults — shipped with OmniRoute.

External pricing sync is opt-in, disabled by default. Relevant env vars (see .env.example):

The cost formula

Cost is computed per request from token counts and per-million-token rates in src/lib/usage/costCalculator.ts (computeCostFromPricing / calculateCost):

• Input tokens (minus cache reads and cache-creation tokens) × input rate.
• Cache-read tokens × cached rate (falls back to the input rate).
• Cache-creation tokens × cache_creation rate (falls back to the input rate).
• Output tokens × output rate.
• Reasoning tokens × reasoning rate (falls back to the output rate).

All rates are interpreted as USD per 1,000,000 tokens. A Codex "fast"/"priority" or "flex" service tier applies a cost multiplier (getCodexFastCostMultiplier) — e.g. flex is billed at a 50% token discount, surfaced as flex savings in the dashboard.

Model names are normalized first (provider-path prefixes such as openai/ or accounts/fireworks/models/ are stripped) so historical rows still match a price.

How spend is recorded

• The per-request cost is computed after the response and recorded fire-and-forget so it never adds latency to the client. Shared-quota consumption is scheduled on the next event-loop tick via src/lib/quota/spendRecorder.ts.

• API-key spend is buffered and flushed in batches by the SpendBatchWriter (default 60s flush interval, 1,000-entry buffer). Tunable via:

  Env var	Default	Purpose
  OMNIROUTE_SPEND_FLUSH_INTERVAL_MS	60000	Flush interval in milliseconds.
  OMNIROUTE_SPEND_MAX_BUFFER_SIZE	1000	Max buffered entries before flush.

The dashboard's cost figures are not read from a stored per-row dollar amount — they are recomputed on the fly from token counts and the current pricing table each time the analytics endpoint runs. That means correcting a wrong price (and re-syncing) updates historical cost estimates retroactively.

Dashboard: the Costs page

The Costs page lives at /dashboard/costs (src/app/(dashboard)/dashboard/costs/). Its main view is the Cost Overview tab (src/app/(dashboard)/dashboard/costs/CostOverviewTab.tsx), which loads everything from GET /api/usage/analytics.

What it shows:

• Spend tiles — estimated spend for Today (1d), 7d, 30d, and the selected window. Range selector: 7d, 30d, 90d, all.
• Headline metrics — requests in window, active providers, active models, average cost per request.
• Cost Explorer — a sortable/filterable table grouped by provider, model, API key, account, or service tier, with cost, requests, tokens, avg cost/request, and share-of-total %.
• Token usage — total / input / output tokens and input:output ratio.
• Routing efficiency — fallback count, fallback rate, and requested-model coverage.
• Monthly forecast — projects month-end spend from the recent daily average.
• Period comparison — % change between the first and second half of the window.
• Charts — daily cost trend, provider share (pie), top providers, top models, cost by API key, cost by account, weekly usage pattern, and an activity heatmap.
• Export — download the current window as CSV or JSON (the buttons appear once there is non-zero cost data).

When there is no priced traffic, rows render as a "Legacy / Free" label instead of $0, reflecting the savings-tracker model.

Related Costs sub-pages

The Costs area also hosts (all under /dashboard/costs/):

• Pricing (/dashboard/costs/pricing) — view and override per-model prices (renders the shared Pricing tab).
• Budget (/dashboard/costs/budget) — set per-scope spend limits (renders the shared Budget tab).
• Quota Share (/dashboard/costs/quota-share) — shared-quota pools and burn-rate views.

API endpoints

All of these require management auth (loopback/JWT, via requireManagementAuth) unless noted.

Usage & cost analytics

Budgets

The budget API is scoped per API key (apiKeyId). Limits returned by GET /api/usage/budget include dailyLimitUsd, weeklyLimitUsd, monthlyLimitUsd, a warningThreshold, and the running totals (totalCostToday, totalCostMonth, …).

Pricing

Other cost-relevant endpoints

CLI

OmniRoute's CLI exposes cost, usage, and pricing commands (registered in bin/cli/commands/registry.mjs).

omniroute cost

A cost report aggregated from /api/usage/analytics.

omniroute cost                          # last 30d, grouped by provider
omniroute cost --period 7d              # last 7 days
omniroute cost --group-by model         # group by provider | model | combo | api-key | day
omniroute cost --since 2026-06-01 --until 2026-06-13
omniroute cost --api-key <key> --limit 50

Columns: group, requests, tokens in/out, cost (USD), and % of total. A grand total line is printed at the end (suppressed with --quiet or --output json).

omniroute usage

omniroute usage analytics --period 30d [--provider <id>]   # per-provider cost summary
omniroute usage logs [--limit 100] [--follow] [--api-key <k>] [--search <q>]
omniroute usage quota [--provider <id>] [--check]
omniroute usage utilization [--api-key <k>]
omniroute usage history [--limit 100]
omniroute usage proxy-logs [--limit 100]

# Budgets
omniroute usage budget list
omniroute usage budget get [scope]
omniroute usage budget set <amount> [--scope global] [--period monthly]
omniroute usage budget reset [scope]

omniroute pricing

omniroute pricing list [--provider <p>] [--model <m>] [--limit 200]
omniroute pricing get <model>
omniroute pricing sync [--provider <p>] [--force]   # POST /api/pricing/sync
omniroute pricing diff [--model <m>]
omniroute pricing defaults show
omniroute pricing defaults set [--input <p>] [--output <p>] [--cache-read <p>] [--cache-write <p>]

pricing defaults show reads GET /api/pricing/defaults. To edit individual model prices instead, use the Pricing dashboard page or PATCH /api/pricing.

Troubleshooting

• All costs show $0 / "Legacy / Free". The models in use have no pricing entry. Enable external sync (PRICING_SYNC_ENABLED=true) and run omniroute pricing sync, or set prices manually via the Pricing page / PATCH /api/pricing.
• A historical model is mispriced. Fix the price (override or re-sync) — cost is recomputed from token counts on every analytics read, so estimates update retroactively.
• Spend lags behind real time. Per-key spend is batched; lower OMNIROUTE_SPEND_FLUSH_INTERVAL_MS if you need fresher numbers.

For where this fits in the broader dashboard, see the User Guide and the Features Gallery.