[Feature]: Project-scoped end-user/customer budget limits

[javimp2003uma]

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The Feature

I’m using LiteLLM Projects and would like to enforce both:

A monthly budget at the Project level, for example 100 EUR/month.
A separate monthly budget per end-user consuming through that Project, for example 15 EUR/month per user.

Ideally, I would like to use a single virtual key attached to the Project and send the end-user ID in each request, for example via x-litellm-end-user-id or user.

However, from what I understand, customer/end-user budgets seem to be global for a given customer/user ID, rather than scoped to the Project.

The only workaround I can think of right now is creating one virtual key per end-user under the Project, each with its own budget limit. This would work, but it makes key management much more complex.

Could you confirm whether LiteLLM currently supports Project-scoped end-user/customer budget limits? If not, is there a recommended way to achieve this, or would you consider supporting this natively?

Thanks.

Motivation, pitch

.

What part of LiteLLM is this about?

Proxy

LiteLLM is hiring a founding backend engineer, are you interested in joining us and shipping to all our users?

No

Twitter / LinkedIn details

No response

[krrish-berri-2]

why do you want to scope end user budget by project?

also why use projects here instead of teams?

cc: @ryan-crabbe-berri

[javimp2003uma]

why do you want to scope end user budget by project?

also why use projects here instead of teams?

cc: @ryan-crabbe-berri

@krrish-berri-2 the problem we do have is that Enterprise license has 5 teams as max, then we have to overengineer the team-project-key hierarchy so as to lose as few teams as possible

[krrish-berri-2]

but why set budgets on end user per project? can you share the use-case?

[javimp2003uma]

@krrish-berri-2 lets say I have 1 team por Claude Code use case. When using Claude Code, I want to divide the developers into groups (front-end developers, back-end developers, systems developers, etc.) and for each of these groups I want: an overall budget (for example, a total of more than 200 euros to be spent by the group as a whole, with no individual member spending more than 25 euros)

[AgentGymLeader]

End-user budgets are global per user_id right now — _check_end_user_budget just reads spend:end_user:{user_id}, no project in the key. So two projects sharing an end-user share one budget. Project budgets themselves already work fine (_project_max_budget_check), it's the nested end-user-within-project piece that's missing.

What's interesting is you basically already have the shape of this for teams. Team-member budgets enforce against spend:team_member:{user_id}:{team_id} off the LiteLLM_TeamMembership row. A project-scoped end-user budget would be the same idea, one level over: a composite counter like spend:project:{project_id}:end_user:{user_id}, persisted somewhere project-keyed, checked when a project context is present.

Happy to take a crack at it. Before I do — given the back-and-forth above about projects vs teams, do you actually want this hung off Projects, or would you rather it be a generalization of the existing team-member budget mechanism? And should the project-scoped end-user budget override the global end-user budget when both exist, or stack? Don't want to build the wrong primitive.

[Ramvibecode]

I’m researching this exact problem for AI SaaS builders.

From your description, the painful part seems to be enforcing per-end-user budgets inside a project without creating one virtual key per user.

Quick question: are you looking for this mainly inside LiteLLM itself, or would a small hosted layer/API that maps SaaS users to monthly budgets and checks limits before each LLM call also solve it?

Trying to understand the use case before building anything. Thanks.