A step-by-step path from a funded nRouter account to a production LLM call with a spend ceiling on it — create a scoped key, point your existing OpenAI client at one base URL, cap the key, and verify the cost header came back.
Provider breadth behind a single OpenAI-compatible key. What the swap changes in your codebase, what the model string buys you, which providers are live today, and the integration work that stops being yours to maintain.
Bring-your-own-key sounds customer-friendly and mostly relocates work to you. nRouter issues one key and credits and manages every provider account — here is the reasoning, the blast-radius math, what the choice costs you, and who should pick a BYOK gateway instead.
A flat organization works until the second team arrives, and then every key, budget and policy is visible to everyone. Here is how nRouter nests org, team and key, which control attaches where, and why the team a request is billed to is read from the key rather than the request body.
A management credential and an inference credential are different tools with different blast radii. Here is how to issue one virtual key per environment-and-service pair, narrow it with the four scope fields, cap it, and rotate it without downtime.
A rate limit caps velocity, a budget caps total spend, and confusing the two is how a runaway loop burns a month of headroom before anything fires. Here is how RPM and TPM limits resolve per key, team and org, what each 429 means, and why the caller can never raise one.
An agent sends hundreds of calls without a human in the loop, so the loop bug you have not written yet is a billing event. Give each agent role its own key with its own rate ceiling and spend cap, enforced at the gateway rather than in the agent code that has the bug.
