ai-meter

@caisson/ai-meter is the money path for metered AI inference: estimate a call's cost before it runs, reserve that amount up front, then true the charge to the provider's actual usage once the call completes. Built on the integer credit ledger, so a charge is never a float and never drifts.

What it does

• Estimate → reserve → reconcile. reserve() prices a call from a versioned, per-provider/model price book and debits the wallet before the provider is ever called, a short wallet or an open circuit breaker fails the call with no spend and no provider round-trip. reconcile() trues the reservation to the provider's reported usage: refunds an over-reservation, charges a shortfall, or leaves the ledger untouched when the estimate was exact.
• A per-tenant spend window + soft/hard caps. Every reserve bumps an atomic running-spend counter for the tenant's current window (day/month/etc.); crossing a soft cap warns, crossing a hard cap trips a circuit breaker so every subsequent call fails closed until an operator resets it.
• A bundled, overridable price book. Ships default per-million-token rates for common provider/model pairs; a buyer can override the whole book or the credit denomination. resolvePriceEntry throws on an unrecognized provider/model instead of metering at zero.
• Idempotent by construction. Both reserve() and reconcile() key off the caller's callId: a retried call settles exactly once instead of double-charging.
• A pre-call dedup gate. checkDedupGate() flags a prompt that's near-identical to one already in flight (an agent loop rewording a retry, a user re-asking the same question) before the price book ever prices it. Detection only, it never auto-skips a call or moves a credit itself.

Quickstart

import { withTenant } from "@caisson/tenancy-rls";
import { reserve, reconcile } from "@caisson/ai-meter";

await withTenant(db, accountId, async (tx) => {
  const reserved = await reserve(tx, {
    accountId,
    callId,
    provider: "openai",
    model: "gpt-4o",
    lane: "default",
    messages: [{ role: "user", content: "hello" }],
  });

  // ... call the provider, using reserved.reservedCredits to size the request ...

  await reconcile(tx, {
    accountId,
    callId,
    provider: "openai",
    model: "gpt-4o",
    lane: "default",
    reservedCredits: reserved.reservedCredits,
    usage: { inputTokens: 12, outputTokens: 40, cachedInputTokens: 0 },
    windowKey: reserved.windowKey,
  });
});

Circuit breaker

assertBreakerClosed runs before every reserve(): an open breaker throws SpendCapError (402) with no provider call made. A crossed hard cap trips it (tripBreaker); it stays open until an operator calls resetBreaker, so a runaway loop can't spend past the cap on the next retry.

import { assertBreakerClosed, resetBreaker } from "@caisson/ai-meter";

await assertBreakerClosed(tx, accountId, "default"); // throws SpendCapError if open
// ... after investigating a tripped breaker ...
await resetBreaker(tx, accountId, "default");

Dedup-before-meter gate

checkDedupGate runs a dependency-free MinHash/LSH similarity check against recent calls in the same account and scope, ahead of the price-book estimate, a Jaccard similarity above 0.92 returns duplicate-of so the caller can choose to skip or reuse the earlier result.

Configuration

parsePriceBook and parseCreditConversion validate an operator-supplied price book or credit denomination before it replaces BUNDLED_PRICE_BOOK / CREDIT_CONVERSION: an invalid override fails closed rather than metering silently at zero.

Composing with the base

ai-meter is a base primitive, it never imports an edition. It runs on the same Postgres-atomic accounting as @caisson/credits and is scoped per tenant through @caisson/tenancy-rls's withTenant. The AI Production Kit's inference gateway composes reserve()/reconcile() around the provider call site; ai-meter itself never talks to a provider.