Introduction

What is AI Cost Gate?

AI Cost Gate is a self-hosted cost gateway for AI agents. It sits between your agents and the upstream LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Volcano Engine, OpenRouter, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint) and does four things well:

1. Attributes every dollar of LLM spend to a project, an agent, a model, and a provider.
2. Enforces budgets with throttling, alerts, and a hard auto-stop.
3. Records metadata only — tokens, cost, latency, project tags. Prompts, responses, and uploaded images are never persisted.
4. Exposes a local dashboard for production-grade observability without sending data to any SaaS.

You run it on your own machine. A single SQLite file is the whole database. One docker compose up and you have a live cost gateway in under 10 minutes.

What's in this portal

This portal (acg-protal) is the public-facing website for AI Cost Gate. It includes:

• Marketing pages — landing, pricing, and the /pro page that describes what you get with a one-time Pro purchase.
• Buy Pro — a Creem-powered checkout flow that grants you collaborator access to the private ai-cost-gate repository on GitHub.
• Pro dashboard — at /dashboard/pro, you can see your license status, the GitHub invitation state, and your purchase history.
• Admin — for the project maintainer, an /admin/licenses view lists every Pro purchase and lets you track GitHub invitations.
• Live demos — at /demo, three short scenarios show auto-stop, multi-agent cost attribution, and the metadata-only design, all backed by real traffic from a public ai-cost-gate instance.
• Docs — what you're reading.

What's NOT in this portal

• The gateway itself lives in a separate repository, CostBrake/ai-cost-gate. Pro buyers get collaborator access to the private mirror.
• The Pro source code is a one-time purchase. Free users can use the public demos, the documentation, and the live sandbox.

Where to go next

• Quickstart — get the public ai-cost-gate instance running in 10 minutes.
• Get Pro — buy the full source, one payment, lifetime updates within v1.x.
• Try the demos — no signup, no deploy, real data.