Five ways AI breaks. One platform that holds. — Nemo Router
AI cost is unbounded by default.
Software used to be license-based and predictable. AI is metered by the token — and one runaway agent loop can outspend an entire department before finance ever sees a dashboard.
Surprise AI bill
Cancelled projects
Runaway loops
- An unnamed corporation accidentally ran up a $500 million Claude AI bill in a single month after rolling out AI with zero usage caps.
- Uber burned its entire annual AI budget in four months; agentic loops can eat ~1000× the tokens of one query.
- Gartner: 40% of agentic-AI projects will be cancelled by 2027 due to cost overruns.
RUNAWAY SPEND
YAHOO FINANCE EXCLUSIVEClient Accidentally Burns $500 Million on Claude AI in One Month
TECHCRUNCH BRIEFThe token bill comes due: the scramble to manage AI’s runaway costs
INC. ANALYSISThe $500 Million AI Mistake Every Company Is Rushing to Avoid
CIO FOR SUBSCRIBERSAI costs spiral: how CIOs are reining in the runaway bill
Spend is governed before the call, not reconciled after.
Four ceilings run in parallel at pre-flight — per-org, per-team, per-key budgets plus RPM/TPM. Credits reserve before the request and settle on the real cost after. Hit a ceiling and the call is refused with a hard 402. The runaway simply can’t happen.
Budget enforcement
blocking nowReserve credits before the call · settle the exact cost after. The over-cap request never runs.
The model you bet on rarely stays the best.
Bet your product on one provider’s SDK and you’ve signed up for a seven-figure migration the day a better — or cheaper — model ships. And every key your team commits is one more secret to leak.
Leaked credentials
YoY leak increase
Keys exposed
- AI credential and API key leaks grew 81% year-over-year, with 28.65 million credentials leaked on GitHub in a single year.
- Over 113,000 DeepSeek API keys were found exposed online in a secrets sweep in early 2026.
- Only 6% of IT leaders say they can switch provider SDKs cleanly; 47% would see business functions stop.
All your models behind one key. Switching is a string.
We hold and rotate every provider credential — no BYOK. One Nemo Router key gates the entire catalog through one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so swapping gpt → claude → gemini is a one-line change. Provider keys never touch developer machines or public repos.
Before · 5 keys, 5 bills
Nemo Router
sk-nemo-·····7f3a
After · every model
One paste leaks customer data.
You can’t ban AI — people just route around the block with a personal account. The only thing that actually stops a leak is a checkpoint that sits in the request path, on every call.
DLP violations
YoY jump in leaks
Prompts with PII
- ChatGPT alone generated 410 million data loss prevention violations in a single year—a 99.3% increase.
- Nearly 1 in 10 workplace AI prompts contains customer PII or SSNs, bypassed via personal accounts.
- A community bank parent disclosed a shadow-AI breach after an employee uploaded names, DOBs and SSNs.
DATA LEAKS
BANKING EXCLUSIVECommunity bank discloses shadow-AI cybersecurity incident
TOM'S GUIDE ALERTEmployees are unknowingly leaking company secrets through ChatGPT
CIO ANALYSIS12 AI prompts that leak enterprise data — and how to fix them
THE REGISTER BRIEFEmployees regularly paste company secrets into ChatGPT
Guardrails run inline on every request.
Content safety, PII detection and redaction, keyword blocklists, and prompt-injection defense run in the path on every call — with a key > team > org scope so policy is set centrally and overridable locally. Because the gateway is always in path, there is no shadow route around it.
Guardrails
in path · every callEnforced centrally at the gateway path. Overrides configure key > team > org.
One model is a single point of failure.
Wire every app straight to one model and its worst day becomes yours. The teams that stayed online through the big outages were the ones that could fail over to another provider in milliseconds.
ChatGPT downtime
Cost increase
Unexpected charges
- A single routing misconfiguration took down ChatGPT for 15 hours, knocking out every bot wired to it.
- Enterprise AI operational costs rose 108% year-over-year, with 78% of IT leaders hit by unexpected charges.
- Flat routing overpays: sending simple classification or extraction requests to premium flagship models.
Failover and routing at one in-path seam.
Cost-, latency-, or weight-based routing picks the deployment per request; provider fallback chains fail over a dead model instead of failing the user. Deterministic A/B experiments split traffic so you test before you commit — all config, no app redeploy.
Smart routing
active failoverNemo Router Gateway
Evaluating target...
claude-opus
gpt-5
Automatic failover and smart routing policies evaluate targets inline—redirecting calls from down providers in milliseconds.
Nobody knows why the bill was $4,800.
A surprise bill isn’t scary because of the number — it’s scary because nobody can say who spent it, on which prompt, or whether it was a human or an infinite loop. Spread across five consoles, attribution is impossible.
Provider consoles
Surprise AI bill
To reconcile
- A company received a surprise $4,800 monthly bill with zero attribution, audit logs, or owner details.
- FinOps teams spend up to a week manually reconciling cost across 5 consoles due to computed drift.
- Without per-key or per-team attribution, it is impossible to set budgets, bill departments, or catch runaways.
One honest console. Real provider cost, attributed.
We read provider-reported cost (never compute it), surface it as x-nemo-request-cost, and attribute every call to its key, team and org. One hard invariant holds the product together: displayed spend equals the API equals the credit ledger.
Cost & usage
displayed == ledgerSpend · MTD
$0.2732
provider-reported
Avg / request
$0.000045
72 requests
Projected
$0.3628
month-end
Spend by model
One key. One bill. One bar of control over every model your team touches.
Whoever's asking “why,” the answer holds up.
The team adopting it
“Will this actually simplify our stack?”
One key replaces every provider account, contract, and invoice. Finance gets one bill with hard budgets; engineering gets every model behind two lines of code. Nothing to self-host, nothing to stitch.
- One key for every model
- Hard budgets per key, team & org
- Guardrails + PII redaction inline
- Automatic failover & smart routing
- One invoice, real provider cost
- Team roles, keys & request logs
The investor diligencing it
“Where is the durable moat?”
A platform fee on managed governance — multi-tenancy, billing, RBAC, budgets, guardrails — that compounds as model count grows. We win precisely because switching models is free for the customer and sticky for the platform.
- 0–4% platform fee, not a token markup
- Stickier as model count grows
- Governance is the lock-in, not the model
The builder just looking
“How fast can I ship?”
Sign up, grab a key, point the OpenAI SDK at our base URL. You are calling every model in under a minute — no provider keys, no infrastructure, $5 in free credits to start.
- OpenAI-compatible — keep your SDK
- $5 free credits, no card required
- Live in under a minute
One key. Every model.
Start in under a minute.
Bring the OpenAI SDK you already use, point it at our base URL, and route across providers with budgets and guardrails on from request one.
No credit card · $5 free credits to start