# The price table > What a model's tokens cost, so a channel's daily_usd can mean something. Micro-USD per million tokens, four tiers per model, and a model with no price refuses rather than costing nothing. Source: https://getlibero.com/docs/price-table/ · Libero v0.7.0 · pre-1.0 --- A team sheet's [`[budget] daily_usd`](https://getlibero.com/docs/team-sheet.md#budget) caps a channel's invoice. The proxy cannot resolve that without knowing what a model's tokens cost, and no provider tells it — so the prices are a file you write, review, and mount read-only, exactly as you do the team sheets. You need one only if a channel sets `daily_usd`. A workspace capping tokens and tool calls needs no prices, and `PROXY_PRICE_TABLE` can stay unset. ```toml [[model]] id = "claude-sonnet-4-6" input = 3_000_000 output = 15_000_000 cache_write = 3_750_000 cache_read = 300_000 ``` `prices/example/prices.toml` in the repository is the starter file to copy. ## Units **Micro-USD per million tokens, as integers.** Money is not a float: a budget that accumulates a fraction per token drifts, and the drift is invisible until someone disputes a refusal. Per *million* rather than per token because a per-token price in micro-USD would round to zero for every model on the market, and a table of zeroes is a table nobody can review. | what you mean | what you write | | --- | --- | | $3.00 per million input tokens | `input = 3_000_000` | | $0.30 per million cache reads | `cache_read = 300_000` | | free | `0` | **All four tiers are required.** Cache reads run about a tenth of input price and cache writes above it, so a table that gave them one number would be wrong by an order of magnitude on a cache-heavy agent — which is every agent here. The meter keeps the four counts apart all the way to the decision precisely so this can. `0` is legal and means free: a self-hosted model whose real dollar cost is nothing, said out loud. Leaving a model out is the *different* statement that its spend cannot be priced at all. ## Key it by the model that served, not the model you asked for The `id` must be the one the **provider echoes back**. Usually that is the one your team sheet's `[llm] model` asked for, and under a router it is not: a LiteLLM resolves an alias — yours or the included sidecar's, the difference being whose spelling it is — and Bedrock and Vertex carry their own prefixes. That difference is the whole reason `daily_usd` exists — a cap in tokens is only a cap on spend if the model is fixed. The proxy logs the served id on every spend report, which is where to read the spelling this file needs: ``` {"event":"spend_reported","channel":"C024BE91L","model":"claude-sonnet-4-6","tokens":1247,…} ``` `node dist/budget.js show ` prints the same thing as a per-model split of the day. ## A model with no price refuses **Spend the table cannot price stops the channel**, rather than costing nothing. A model absent from the table is like a tool absent from the allowlist: the answer is a refusal. It reads oddly the first time, because the channel may be nowhere near its cap — but a cap whose position cannot be computed is not a cap, and the alternative prices unknown models free, which is exactly how a router becomes an uncapped spend path. Two faults, because the remedies differ and the proxy says which: | the channel is told | what happened | what to do | | --- | --- | --- | | *…is not in the proxy's price table* | a model was reported that this file does not list | add it, naming the id in the message | | *…was reported without naming a model* | the agent reported counts but no model | upgrade or look at the agent; the proxy log names the reports | Neither can happen to a channel that does not set `daily_usd`. Without that field the price table is never consulted at all. Two reserved ids appear in `budget.js show` and never in this file. `(unreported)` is spend whose report named no model — it is the second row above. `(legacy)` is spend recorded before the meter had a model column at all; it is priced at zero, because no sheet asked for it to be capped when it was spent, and it ages out with one UTC day. ## Editing it while the proxy runs The file is re-read when it changes, so **correcting a price re-prices spend already recorded today**, on the channel's next call. That is deliberate: a price table is config you author, so it will eventually contain a typo, and if cost were accumulated as it was metered the only remedy would be a budget reset — which also discards the spend that was right. A file that stops parsing keeps the last good table and says so in the log, so a syntax error mid-edit does not widen or narrow anything. A file that is **removed** drops it, because serving prices out of bytes that are no longer on disk is serving a number nobody can review — and dropping it fails closed. There is **no shipped default table**. A price list baked into a released image goes stale on the provider's schedule and is then trusted, which is the failure this whole feature exists to fix. ## Telling when it has gone stale A price table goes out of date on the provider's schedule, not yours, and the ordinary way to find out is the invoice. If your deployment reaches models through a **LiteLLM** — one you already run or the sidecar in the compose file — there is an earlier signal: the gateway prices every call from its own table and reports what it charged, and the proxy keeps that figure beside the one it computed from this file. ```bash docker compose run --rm proxy node dist/drift.js show ``` ``` days 2026-08-24 to 2026-08-29 (UTC) price table a3f1c02e5b7d9e14 claude-sonnet-4-6 1284 turns computed $4.1230 reported $4.6010 +11.6% your table prices this model below the gateway. A channel's daily_usd is allowing more real spend than it reads. ``` The direction is the part to act on. **Below** the gateway means a channel's `daily_usd` is letting more real spend through than the number in its sheet suggests; **above** means it is cutting the channel off earlier than the operator intended. `drift days ` splits the same comparison by day, which is where you see *when* one of the two tables changed. The comparison is drawn at the moment you ask, from the table as it stands — so correcting a price and running it again shows the difference gone, over spend that was already recorded. That is the same property [editing it while the proxy runs](#editing-it-while-the-proxy-runs) describes. **None of this enforces anything.** No call was refused or allowed because of a figure in that record, there is no exit code for a large difference, and what a channel may spend is decided from this file alone. A gateway's price map is a second opinion worth having and is not a thing the proxy meters on — that would move enforcement out of the proxy and onto a number it did not compute. Two things do not appear there, deliberately. A call **nobody priced** — every direct provider call, and any model the gateway has never heard of — is not a disagreement, so it is not recorded at all; a gateway that priced a call at *zero* is recorded, because that is a statement. And a model with no row in this file shows as `no price for this model`, which is [the fault that already refuses channels](#a-model-with-no-price-refuses) and has a different remedy. Set `PROXY_DRIFT_DB` to keep the record; the compose file ships it set. A deployment calling providers directly can leave it off — nothing reports a cost for it to hold. ## Versions The version recorded against a decision is the **digest of the file's bytes**, not a line in it. A declared `version = "3"` is a claim about the bytes that nothing checks, and two tables that differed by a digit could call themselves the same thing. The digest is logged when the table loads: ``` {"event":"price_table_loaded","file":"/data/prices/prices.toml","version":"a3f1c02e5b7d9e14","count":4} ``` Keep the file in git, and that digest ties a running proxy's prices to a commit.