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, BYOK, 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 BYOK 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.