You pay for what the router does.
Metered monthly. Invoiced in arrears. ACH preferred.
There are no seats, no plans and nothing to outgrow. Four units are metered; your rate card for those units lives in your agreement. What follows is the shape of the pricing and the mechanics of the meter — everything except the numbers that are yours specifically.
Drag the volume. Watch the curves separate.
The y-axis is relative spend, not currency. The point of this chart is the gap: as volume grows, a larger share of traffic classifies downward, so the routed curve bends flatter while paying frontier prices for everything does not.
Curves are modelled from the observed distribution across managed traffic and are illustrative of shape, not a quotation. Your own mix is visible in the portal from day one, and reconciled at the close of each period.
Four units. That is the whole list.
per request
Every request that enters the router and receives a decision — whether it resolved at the first attempt or climbed three rungs. One request is one unit, regardless of how much work the ladder did behind it.
per evaluation
Each runbook decision, including the ones made during retries and escalations. A request that escalates twice generates three evaluations, which is why the trace shows you every one of them.
monthly reconciliation
At the close of the period we compute what your traffic would have cost at naive frontier-tier routing, compare it to what it actually cost, and bill a share of the difference. If the router does not save you anything, this line is zero — which is the whole point of pricing it this way.
per route, per period
Distinct configured route entries live at any point during the period. Routes you defined but never sent traffic to are not billed; routes carrying one request are.
Because the third unit is a share of demonstrated savings, the router's incentive and yours point the same direction: it earns more by routing traffic down, never up.
Meter continuously. Invoice monthly. Pay by ACH.
Meter continuously
Quantities accrue in real time and are visible in your portal the moment they happen. No sampling, no daily rollup delay, no estimate.
Invoice monthly
At period close, quantities are reconciled, the savings share is computed, and one invoice is issued against the rates in your agreement.
Pay by ACH
ACH is the default and is fee-free. Card is available and carries the processor's fee. Both live in the portal under Payment.
Your rate card lives in your agreement. Your dashboard shows quantities; your invoice is the only place money appears.
a portfolio of client-reporting teams
model spend −58% · traffic re-tiered 71% · product code changed 0 lines
an electrical contracting group
frontier calls −93% · p50 2.1s → 310ms · escalation rate 6.4%
The six people actually ask.
There is a monthly platform minimum, set in your agreement and sized to your expected volume rather than to a published tier. It exists because onboarding a runbook, wiring your providers and standing up failover paths is real engineering work that happens before your first request routes. It is credited against metered usage, so at normal volumes you never notice it.
Nothing punitive. Usage-based pricing has no overage concept because there is nothing to be over — you are metered on what happened. If you want a ceiling, that is what the budget clause is for: set a soft guard and the router pins traffic to the cheapest tier once the period allowance is spent, or set a hard guard and over-budget requests are refused with 429 budget_exhausted. Both are policy decisions in your runbook, not a billing negotiation.
Two arrangements, and you choose. Under bring-your-own-keys, your provider contracts stay yours, you are billed by them directly, and GhostRouter bills only for the four metered units. Under managed provisioning, provider spend passes through on your GhostRouter invoice at cost, listed as its own line with the underlying quantities. There is no margin on pass-through, because a router that profits from expensive models is a router you cannot trust.
A routed request is metered to the period in which its decision closed, not the one in which it arrived. A request that starts at 23:59:58 on the last day of the month and escalates twice belongs entirely to the old period, along with all three of its policy evaluations. Active routes are counted as distinct entries live at any point during the period, so a route added on the 29th counts once, not for two days.
Because card processing carries a percentage fee on an invoice that is often five figures, and that fee buys nobody anything. ACH is fee-free, settles predictably and is what nearly every client uses. Card remains available in the portal for teams whose procurement requires it; the processor's fee is shown before you confirm, never absorbed silently into the total.
Written notice, and the term in your agreement — typically 30 days. Your runbooks are your files: they live in your repository throughout, so cancellation does not repatriate anything, it just stops the router from executing them. Decision history is exportable in full for the retention window, and the final invoice covers the period to the date of termination with no early-exit charge.
Ready to see the numbers?
Send your rough monthly volume and the shape of your traffic. You get back a rate schedule and a draft runbook, in that order.