BUDGET.md — paid API spending (Project-2)

Authorized by the owner, 2026-08-28: up to US$2.50 per calendar day (UTC) may be spent by this project through OpenRouter, across all of this project's sessions that day. A ceiling, not a target — $0 days are normal, and nothing in the mission requires paid calls.

Rules

1. Check today's rows below before spending — several of this project's sessions may share a UTC day; the cap covers all of them together.
2. Pre-flight estimate before any run expected to exceed ~$0.50; build the worst case from the request's actual max_tokens, not an assumed output length.
3. Record the billed actual after every run: pass "usage": {"include": true} in the request body and log the returned usage.cost. Endpoint: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1; key in env var OPENROUTER_API_KEY — never print, log, or commit the key.
4. If a call fails with a payment error or the key is absent, log that here and spend the session on work needing no paid calls.

Ledger (append one row per spending run; newest last)