Projects

Projects are the organizational unit in Gateway. Every project has a unique slug, its own budget, routing policy, and compression settings. Requests are scoped to a project via the X-Project-Id header. Projects are the foundation — routing, compression, budgeting, and spend tracking all attach to a project.

What you can do with projects

• Set budgets — dollar limit + billing period; Gateway tracks spend and alerts or blocks at thresholds. See Cost Governance and Savings for details.
• Configure routing — org default or project-specific override. See Routing Policies.
• Configure compression — org default or project-specific override. See Context Compression.
• Track spend — per-project view in the dashboard; managed vs BYOK spend, model/provider breakdowns.
• Apply tags — attach key-value tags via headers or API keys; drive tag-based routing rules and spend tracking by tag.

Creating a project

Create a project from the Gateway dashboard using the four-step wizard:

1. Details — name, slug (unique per org, used as the X-Project-Id value), and optional description.
2. Budget — amount (USD), period (daily / weekly / monthly / quarterly / yearly), enforcement mode (soft / hard), and alert thresholds. You can skip this step and add a budget later.
3. Routing — use the org default or set a project-specific override; choose a fallback or intelligent strategy.
4. Compression — use the org default or set a project-specific override; disabled, context window only, or cost optimization with a target ratio slider.

Scoping requests to a project

Pass the X-Project-Id header with the project slug. Without it, requests use org-level defaults.

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from merge_gateway import MergeGateway
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client = MergeGateway(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")
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response = client.responses.create(
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    model="openai/gpt-5.2",
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    input=[
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        {"type": "message", "role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful programming tutor. Explain the concepts clearly with practical examples."},
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        {"type": "message", "role": "user", "content": "Explain the concept of recursion in programming with a simple set of examples."},
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    ],
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    extra_headers={"X-Project-Id": "my-project-slug"},
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)
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print(response.output[0].content[0].text)

Budgets

Each project can have a budget that caps spend for a billing period. How Gateway enforces that cap depends on the enforcement mode:

Alert thresholds default to 50%, 80%, and 90% of the budget. The dashboard shows color-coded progress bars: blue (< 80%), yellow (80–100%), red (100%+).

Tags

Tags are key-value pairs defined at the org level. They serve two purposes:

• Routing — use tags as conditions in tag-based routing rules. For example, route requests tagged customer_tier: enterprise to a quality-first policy. See Routing Policies for configuration details.
• Spend tracking — view spend broken down by tag in the dashboard’s “By Tag” tab.

The dashboard includes quick-fill templates for common tags like customer_tier, environment, and region.

FAQ

Next steps