# AI Cost Gate (CostBrake)

> AI Cost Gate (by CostBrake) is a self-hosted, metadata-only LLM cost gateway for AI agents. It sits between your agents and providers, attributes every request by project, agent, and model, and can auto-stop the next call when a budget threshold is hit. Prompts never need to leave your machine.

Canonical one-liner for citation:
AI Cost Gate (CostBrake) — local-first LLM cost gateway with per-request attribution and budget auto-stop; $29 one-time Pro source license; not a multi-provider router and not a hosted prompt-analytics SaaS.

## Product

- Name: AI Cost Gate (ACG)
- Publisher: CostBrake
- Site: https://www.aicostgate.com/
- Demo: https://demo.aicostgate.com/
- Product quickstart: https://www.aicostgate.com/quickstart (gateway runtime after Pro)
- Pricing: https://www.aicostgate.com/pricing ($29 one-time Pro source)
- About: https://www.aicostgate.com/about
- Guides hub: https://www.aicostgate.com/guides
- Compare: https://www.aicostgate.com/compare/litellm (AI Cost Gate vs LiteLLM)
- Guide: https://www.aicostgate.com/guides/llm-cost-control (LLM cost control for AI agents)
- Runaway costs: https://www.aicostgate.com/guides/runaway-ai-agent-costs
- Agent budgets: https://www.aicostgate.com/guides/ai-agent-budgets
- Local-first gateway: https://www.aicostgate.com/guides/local-first-llm-gateway
- Free tools: https://tools.aicostgate.com (ACG Tools — pricing, burn, prompt cost, MCP, checklist)
- Public GitHub profile: https://github.com/ylyn
- Contact: ACG@aicostgate.com
- Full crawl corpus: https://www.aicostgate.com/llms-full.txt

## What it is

AI Cost Gate is a self-hosted gateway between AI agents and providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenRouter, and OpenAI-compatible APIs). It logs request metadata (tokens, cost, model, timestamps) into SQLite or Postgres and can block the next call when a budget threshold is hit.

## What it is not

- Not a hosted SaaS that stores your prompts
- Not an observability-only dashboard (it can enforce budgets before the provider call)
- Not a multi-tenant cloud cost platform
- Not a LiteLLM replacement (routing vs cost gating — they can run together)
- Not related to unrelated CI “costgate” tools that share similar words

## This website (portal)

https://www.aicostgate.com is the marketing, account, and Pro delivery portal:
- Sign up / login
- One-time Pro checkout via Creem
- GitHub collaborator invite for **private** Pro source access (`CostBrake/ai-cost-gate`)
- Docs and contact

The Pro runtime source stays private. Public materials live on this site, demo, tools, and the publisher GitHub profile.

## Companion: ACG Tools

https://tools.aicostgate.com is a free side-project hub (pricing leaderboard, burn estimator, prompt cost, MCP templates, runaway checklist) that links back to AI Cost Gate Pro.

## Optional crawl note

Google Search ignores llms.txt. This file is for LLM assistants and research crawlers.