2 min read
Bring your own keys: how GridRouter verifies vendor billing
When you call vendors with your own keys, GridRouter checks each call against the vendor's published billing rules and flags charges that don't match.
Most ways to buy go-to-market data put the price on the call. You pay a credit per lookup, or a markup on the vendor's rate, or a platform fee that grows with every row you enrich. That makes the thing you do most, calling a data vendor, the thing you pay for most.
We think the call should be the cheap part. GridRouter gives away the hard part of the job and charges for the part that actually costs us money to run.
What's free
These stay free after launch, on every plan:
- Routing and fallbacks. Provider preferences, best-value routing and waterfall fallbacks on every call.
- One API and one key. One input and output schema per capability, whichever vendor answers.
- The MCP server. API operations are also MCP tools your agent can call.
- Your own vendor keys. Calls on your keys are never metered or marked up.
Reads of your own data, exports, private cache hits, failed calls and misses on per-hit vendors are free too.
What paid plans will charge for
Three things grow with you, and each has a real cost behind it.
Storage. Every call and every waterfall attempt becomes a log row you can search, with the request and response bodies redacted and encrypted. Your private cache keeps what you already paid for, sealed with a key only your workspace can unwrap. Keeping that for months is disk, encryption and indexes.
Operations. Saved waterfalls and pipelines, queues that retry and respect each vendor's rate limits, and log drains that push your calls to your own tools. That is compute that runs whether or not you are watching.
Governance. More workspaces and keys, read-only SQL over your logs and anomaly alerts, for teams that need to answer to someone.
The Free plan covers a lot of each. The numbers below come from the same plan files as the pricing page:
| Free plan | Planned rate past Free | |
|---|---|---|
| Logged calls | 100,000 a month, 30-day log window | $2 per 100,000 calls |
| Private cache records | 50,000 | $1 per 10,000 record-months hot, $0.25 cold |
| Stored bodies | 1 GB | $0.05 per GB-month |
| Waterfalls and queues | 5 waterfalls, 1 queue | More on paid plans |
| Log drains, SQL, alerts | Not included | Paid plans |
Limits are soft: going past one never breaks a call. Deleting records or shortening retention lowers the bill from the next month.
What we won't do
We won't put a markup on calls made with your own vendor keys, on any plan. You keep your vendor accounts and your negotiated rates, and the vendor bills you directly.
If we later offer calls on GridRouter's own vendor accounts, those will be priced separately and shown before you call. They're not available during launch.
Security isn't a tier
The controls that protect your keys and data are on every plan, Free included: an envelope-encrypted key vault, a hash-chained audit log, Postgres row-level isolation between workspaces, scoped keys and agent tokens, and a check of every call against the vendor's own billing rules. We don't have a SOC 2 report yet; the security page lists what is in place.
How this compares
Other tools price the data itself, and that can be the right model. treg bills metered calls at the provider's own rate with no markup, and FullEnrich spends credits only on verified results. Both are simple to reason about. The difference is where the meter sits: they meter what you look up, and GridRouter will meter what you keep and run. If you mostly want someone else to hold the vendor accounts, a credit model can suit you better. Our comparisons cover each tool with sources.