u/Hungry-Presence-4421

I’m using OpenRouter directly via API key in a language model setup (no framework like LangChain, just raw calls).

I ran what I thought was a pretty innocent prompt (basically just asking it to modify a small UI thing in a Flutter admin dashboard), and it somehow burned $0.4787 in one go.

That feels way too high for what I expected.

So my question is:

• How do I set a hard max token limit per request?
• Or better, how do I enforce a cost cap / usage limit per API key in OpenRouter?
• Is there any built-in way to stop runaway token usage, or do I need to handle it client-side only?

Right now I’m just using a normal API key I created in OpenRouter dashboard, nothing fancy.

Any best practices to avoid getting surprised by charges like this would be appreciated.