Spend controls

You can bound the price you’re willing to pay on a per-request basis with two optional headers. If no provider (marketplace, key relay, or centralized) can serve the request at or below your ceiling, the request is rejected rather than billed at a higher price.

Price-ceiling headers

Header	Meaning
X-Pod-Max-Price-Input	Max price per million input tokens, in USDC microunits
X-Pod-Max-Price-Output	Max price per million output tokens, in USDC microunits

Prices are expressed in USDC microunits (1 USDC = 1,000,000 microunits).

Cap at $0.40/M input and $0.60/M output

curl https://api.usepod.ai/proxy/<token>/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -H "X-Pod-Max-Price-Input: 400000" \
  -H "X-Pod-Max-Price-Output: 600000" \
  -d '{"model":"gpt-5.5","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"hi"}]}'

How ceilings interact with routing

• A candidate is eligible only if both its input and output prices are at or below your ceilings.
• Marketplace and key relay prices are already capped at the cheapest centralized price for the model, so your ceiling filters within that capped set.
• In auto routing, a too-expensive marketplace listing simply falls through to a cheaper option (or to centralized). In marketplace-only routing, it returns a no-provider-at-price result instead of overcharging.

See Routing & matching for the full selection order.