$13 of Usage, $7 of Headroom: A Tiny-Team AI Receipt

01 / A $20 envelope for three developers

Three developers do not necessarily need three monthly subscriptions to use coding assistants. A practical alternative is a shared configuration, a centrally managed API connection, and a spending envelope that everyone understands.

Start with a $20 monthly team budget. In the illustrative receipt below, token usage costs $13, leaving $7 unspent as headroom. That is $4.33 of usage per developer for the month, rounded, or about $0.22 per developer-day across 20 working days.

Those numbers are a planning exercise, not a promise about anyone's workload. A long debugging session can consume more than several days of small edits. The useful part is the accounting method: count each billable token category, then keep the reserve separate.

02 / The $13 receipt, with every assumption exposed

The following rates are hypothetical spreadsheet inputs, not CheapRelay prices or a quote for any model. Replace them with the current rates for your selected model before funding the account. All rates below are per million tokens, and the four usage buckets are separate: cached tokens are not also counted as ordinary input.

• ■ Ordinary input: 12 million tokens × $0.50 = $6.00.
• ■ Generated output: 2 million tokens × $2.00 = $4.00.
• ■ Cache reads: 40 million tokens × $0.05 = $2.00.
• ■ Cache writes: 1.6 million tokens × $0.625 = $1.00.
• ■ Total illustrative usage charge: $13.00.
• ■ Unused budget headroom: $20.00 − $13.00 = $7.00.

The $7 is not a fee, a discount, or a required purchase. It is simply the portion of the team's budget that this example has not consumed. Any applicable taxes, currency conversion, or payment charges would need their own receipt lines rather than being silently absorbed into the token estimate.

03 / Share the configuration, not an exposed master key

Keep one small configuration template in the repository: endpoint, approved model identifier, and sensible output limits. Store credentials outside version control. For an OpenAI-compatible client, CheapRelay's base URL is https://api.cheapapirelay.com/v1; verify the client's configuration instructions rather than appending another /v1 automatically.

CheapRelay provides pay-as-you-go access through one key, with no monthly fee or subscription. Billing includes real token usage, including cache reads and writes. That makes it useful for a team whose coding workload varies, but it does not turn the account balance into an automatic monthly spending cap.

Use a team-controlled gateway if you need individual attribution or enforceable limits. Keep the upstream credential on that gateway and authenticate developers separately. A shared credential on three laptops is simpler, but attribution is weaker and rotation affects everyone. Do not assume that installing the same configuration gives you per-person accounting.

04 / Use $10 and $16 as review points

Assign one person to check usage each working day. At $10, review which tasks are consuming the budget. At $16, pause optional agent runs and approve remaining work manually. These are team procedures unless you implement enforcement in your own gateway; they are not claims about built-in relay controls.

Record usage by date, developer, task, model, and token category wherever your tooling exposes those fields. If attribution is incomplete, label it incomplete. A rough but honest ledger beats a precise-looking allocation invented after the fact.

05 / Cut repeated context before cutting useful work

Start tasks with the relevant files instead of the entire repository. Ask for a plan before authorizing a broad rewrite. Cap unattended loops, and stop an assistant that repeatedly runs the same failing test without changing its hypothesis.

Do not assume cache savings are guaranteed: eligibility, retention, and pricing depend on the selected model and request behavior. Check the actual billed categories before treating repeated context as cheap.

Sign up for CheapRelay when you are ready to test this setup, then replace every hypothetical rate with a current price. After one working week, rebuild the receipt from actual usage. Keep the $20 envelope only if the observed workload fits it.