Control AI Agent API Spend Before It Happens
SatGate puts budget enforcement, revocation, routing, and audit trails in the request path so autonomous agents cannot silently burn through OpenAI, Claude, MCP, or paid API budgets.
Dashboards do not stop agent loops
LLM dashboards, provider billing pages, and token reports are useful after the fact. They tell you what happened. They do not stop an autonomous agent from calling a premium model, retrying a failed tool, or delegating a task into a thousand-dollar loop.
AI agent cost control has to be inline. Every request needs an economic decision before it reaches the upstream provider: who is calling, what route is allowed, what the request costs, whether budget remains, and what should be recorded.
SatGate enforces those decisions at the gateway layer across internal agents, MCP tools, hosted APIs, model providers, and external robot customers.
Common failure modes
- One shared API key hides which agent created the spend.
- Account-level provider caps take down every workload at once.
- Alerts fire after the expensive request already completed.
- MCP tools create cost outside the LLM provider dashboard.
- Agents retry, loop, and delegate faster than humans can intervene.
What SatGate controls
SatGate is not just an observability dashboard. It is the request-path economic control plane for agent/API activity.
Per-agent identity
Separate spend by agent, workflow, tenant, team, token, model, and route instead of sharing one blind API key.
Real-time budgets
Stop runaway spend before the upstream API call, not after a dashboard or billing alert catches up.
Per-tool cost caps
Set limits for MCP tools, paid APIs, premium models, search calls, code agents, and delegated sub-agents.
Revocation and kill switches
Expire, revoke, or narrow capabilities immediately when an agent misbehaves or a task is complete.
Provider routing
Route routine work to lower-cost providers and reserve premium models for tasks that justify the spend.
Audit and attribution
Record who spent what, on which tool, through which route, and why the policy allowed or denied it.
Start with Observe. Graduate to Control. Add Charge when agents become customers.
Attribute every call
Route agent traffic through SatGate to see spend by agent, model, route, tool, tenant, and workflow without blocking production workloads.
Enforce budgets
Apply hard caps, per-request ceilings, route policy, revocation, expiry, and kill switches before the expensive call happens.
Monetize agent access
When APIs become products for external autonomous agents, collect payment with Charge/L402 before unlocking the protected resource.
High-intent use cases
OpenAI API budget limits
Set per-agent and per-workflow spend caps before OpenAI requests leave your environment.
Read guideMCP tool spend control
Attach cost to tool calls and stop runaway Cursor, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or OpenClaw workflows.
Read guideLLM cost management
Move from post-hoc cost dashboards to real-time budget enforcement.
Read guideRobot customer payments
Let external agents pay for protected APIs through a governed request path.
Read guideFind your avoidable agent spend
Use the SatGate ROI calculator to model ghost spend, runaway loops, wasted tool calls, and the payback period for request-path budget enforcement.
Open the ROI calculator