Limits & Gotchas

Do not confuse unknown with free

Unknown pricing must not become zero. Zero is reserved for covered calls, free tiers, or explicit zero-rate tariffs.

Gotchas

Prospective enforcement needs estimates

The engine can block when stored spend is already over a hard limit. To block a call that would exceed the limit, pre-compute an estimate and include it in the decision path.

Provider invoices may not equal computed splits

Actual billed cost can be captured as a total while input/output splits remain tariff-derived for analytics. Do not require split totals to match provider billed total exactly.

OpenRouter overhead is estimate-only

Credit funding fees or account-level markups should be modeled in estimates and what-if analysis, not rewritten into raw usage rows.

Package routes should default to api

The package test context does not register Laravel’s web group. Keep package defaults API-first and let host apps add web/session middleware around admin screens.

PowerShell filter quoting

--filter "A|B" can be interpreted as a pipe in PowerShell. Run one filter at a time or the full suite.