We're a company of about 25 people across engineering, support, and marketing. Everyone currently uses LLM APIs through one shared key, so we have no reliable way to see who is spending money or which models are being used. A test script recently consumed a painful portion of the budget over one weekend.
Ideally, we'd have separate credentials for each team or project, hard spending limits, and a live view of usage by person, team, and model. I also want to avoid becoming the bottleneck for approving every request.
I'm considering using a gateway rather than building internal tooling. One option offers per-key limits and usage analytics, while another can provide similar controls if self-hosted. Has anyone deployed an LLM gateway company-wide and found a setup that provides useful guardrails without creating a lot of process?
3 Answers
For some frontier models, subscription plans can be cheaper than metered API access, especially for interactive individual use. Keep API access for applications and automation, where you need centralized reporting and hard limits. At minimum, configure alerts before a team reaches its cap so an unexpected script doesn’t quietly run all weekend.
The basic pattern is an LLM gateway with RBAC. Sync users from your identity system, assign them to teams, and give each team a budget either across all providers or separately by provider. Users should authenticate individually through the gateway rather than sharing credentials. A self-service portal and directory integration can make onboarding and team changes mostly automatic.
Avoid the shared API key entirely. Give each person or project its own credential, then enforce model allowlists, spending caps, and reset periods at the gateway or provider level. A hosted routing service can be the quickest way to get per-key budgets and usage reporting without maintaining another internal system.
That split makes sense, but subscriptions still need an acceptable-use policy. Anything running in production or unattended should go through individually tracked API credentials rather than a personal plan.