Model spend is invisible until it's a bill
Most teams learn about AI cost overruns from a monthly invoice, long after the workflow that caused it has already run its course.
By business need
Know what every agent costs, before the invoice does.
Model spend is invisible until it's a line item-and by then a looping agent or a misconfigured workflow has already burned the budget. Attribute cost per agent and per team, and cap it at the gateway, before the call completes.
Why it matters
Spend is easy to lose track of and expensive to find out about late
One loop can burn a month's budget in an hour
A retry loop, a runaway agent, or a compromised key doesn't look different from normal traffic until someone is looking for it in real time.
Attribution is what finance actually needs
A total spend number doesn't answer "which team, which agent, which workflow." Attribution does-and it's what turns a cost conversation into a fixable one.
What Lineation does
Cost control built into the gateway your agents already use
Per-agent, per-team cost attribution
Every call is tagged to the agent, owner, and workflow that made it-across every provider, in one schema.
Hard budgets and soft alerts
Set a warning threshold and a hard stop per agent, team, or workflow, enforced at the gateway itself.
Rate limits and concurrency caps
Bound how fast and how wide any single agent can spend, independent of the account-level provider limits.
Real-time spend dashboard
See spend as it happens, broken down by agent, team, model, and provider, not a month in arrears.
How it works
Five steps from invisible spend to a budget you control
Meter every call
The LLM gateway captures token count and cost for every request across every connected provider.
Attribute cost
Each call is tagged to the agent, team, and workflow responsible, not just the account it ran under.
Set budgets and alerts
Configure soft thresholds and hard caps at whatever level makes sense-agent, team, or org.
Enforce hard caps
When a hard limit is hit, the gateway can block the call before it completes, not after it's billed.
Report spend with usage
Cost and usage live in one dashboard, so finance and engineering are looking at the same numbers.
FAQ
Common questions
How does this work across multiple providers?
The LLM gateway normalizes every call across OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot into one schema, so spend is metered and attributed consistently regardless of provider.
Does a hard cap risk breaking production workflows?
Caps are configurable per agent and workflow, with soft alert thresholds before any hard stop, so teams get warning first.
Can we set different budgets per team or agent?
Yes. Budgets scope to the agent, team, workflow, or org level, each with its own thresholds and limits.
How is this different from provider billing alerts?
Provider alerts show aggregate spend after the fact. Gateway-level control attributes spend to the specific agent responsible and can stop a call before it completes.
Does this add latency to model calls?
Budget checks run against a cached policy set at the gateway, adding negligible overhead on the happy path.
Can finance get their own view without engineering's dashboard?
Yes-spend data is available as a standalone dashboard and report for finance, independent of engineering tooling.
Put a ceiling on model spend today.
Attribute cost, set a budget, and enforce it at the gateway-before the next invoice.