Principles in practice
Principles are easy to declare and harder to live with. This page is the short version of how the previous three translate into product behaviour you can observe.
Routing
| Decision | What we do |
|---|---|
| Default route | lowrouter/auto — picks based on availability, latency, and the carbon heuristic. |
| Pinning | Any caller can pin model, provider, and region per request, or per virtual key. |
| Failover | A provider outage routes to the next eligible option in the same region. We never fail across regions silently. |
| Carbon weight | Routing is biased toward lower-carbon regions when other constraints allow. The bias is configurable and the weight is documented in routing. |
Pricing
| Decision | What we do |
|---|---|
| Pricing model | Pre-paid credits. The price per 1K tokens for each model is shown on the dashboard before you call it. |
| Mark-up | A flat platform fee on top of the upstream provider’s price. Documented per model. |
| Free tier | None. Trying things out costs the same as production usage. |
| Refunds | A failed request that produced no upstream charge does not consume credits. |
The full pricing rules are in credits and billing.
Data handling
| Decision | What we do |
|---|---|
| Prompt logging | We log token counts, model, provider, region, and timing. We do not log prompt or response content. |
| Retention | Token-level usage is retained for 13 months for billing and auditing. Aggregates are kept longer. |
| Export | Usage history can be exported as CSV from the dashboard. |
| Subprocessors | Listed in the privacy policy. |
If you need a Data Processing Agreement, contact us through the channel listed on the legal page.
Operations
| Decision | What we do |
|---|---|
| Status page | Linked from the dashboard footer. |
| Incident communication | Public post-mortems for incidents that affected billing or routing decisions. |
| API stability | Breaking changes are versioned (/api/v1). Additive changes are documented in the changelog. |
What “no” looks like
- We do not auto-upsell to larger models. The defaults aim at the smallest model that produces an acceptable response.
- We do not show comparative quality charts between providers. We are not the right venue to make those judgements; tools that benchmark outputs against reference suites are.
- We do not stockpile features for the sake of feature parity. New endpoints and dashboards are added when there is a defensible reason.