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What Orientim does — and what it doesn't

Last updated: 26 July 2026

1. What it does

• Hard-stops an agent at your cap. Once the spend is reached, the next request is refused with HTTP 402 — not logged, not warned about. Refused.
• Caps the account, not just each agent. An optional ceiling across every agent, because five agents at $50 is $250 of exposure.
• Resets on a schedule. Daily, weekly or monthly, so a cap is set once rather than cleared by hand each time it fills.
• Counts what actually costs money. Chat, streaming, and embeddings — including Anthropic's prompt-cache tokens, which are most of a Claude Code bill and are easy to miss.
• Warns before it stops. A desktop alert at 80% of the cap, and another when the agent is stopped.
• Keeps your provider key out of your tools. They talk to Orientim with a local key; the real one is added on the outbound call and never handed to them or to us.
• Runs entirely on your machine. No account, no cloud, no telemetry. One licence check at activation, then nothing.

2. What it doesn't do

• It doesn't stop a request that's already in flight. A provider only reports cost after it answers, so the call that crosses your cap completes, along with anything already running. Your overshoot is the cost of those calls — one request for a single agent, more if your tool fans out in parallel.
• A request in progress when Orientim stops isn’t counted. If the app is closed, killed, or the machine loses power while a reply is still coming back, the provider bills that call and Orientim never sees the figures to record it. Your next total is short by that one request.
• It can't count what a provider doesn't report. Cost is metered from the usage figures in each reply. A few OpenAI-compatible servers — some self-hosted builds, some custom endpoints — return none, and for those the cap cannot move. Orientim marks those requests and says so on the dashboard rather than showing you a limit that isn’t holding.
• It doesn't see traffic that doesn't pass through it. If a tool talks to the provider directly, or Orientim isn't running, nothing is counted. (Agents pointed at Orientim simply fail while it's closed — they don't quietly bypass it.)
• It doesn't work with Cursor or GitHub Copilot. Those route through their own servers, so a local proxy never sees the requests. Claude Code, Continue, Cline, Aider and any OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible SDK do work.
• It doesn't know the price of a model it has never heard of. New models are billed at a generic rate and flagged as such, and you can enter the real price in one field. Until you do, the cap for that model is an estimate.
• It doesn't encrypt the key file. Your provider key sits in a file in your Windows user profile, like any other credential file on your machine. Anyone with access to your account can read it.
• It isn't DRM or a security boundary. It's a safety net for your own agents, not protection against someone who controls your computer.
• It doesn't manage your provider account. Your keys, your billing, your relationship with OpenAI or Anthropic — all still yours.

3. How accurate are the numbers?

OpenRouter is exact — it reports the real cost of every call and Orientim bills with that figure. Everything else is calculated from token counts and a price table shipped with the app, which you can edit at any time in USD per 1M tokens, the same unit providers publish.

That means Orientim's total will track your provider's invoice closely but will not match it to the cent — rounding, promotional pricing and provider-side billing rules are outside what a local proxy can see. Treat it as an accurate meter, not an accountant.

4. What we support

Email support@orientim.com and we will help with:

• Installing, activating, or moving your licence to another machine
• Connecting a tool or SDK to Orientim
• Anything Orientim itself does wrong

What we can't help with, because it isn't ours to see:

• Your provider's invoice, quotas or rate limits
• What your agent chooses to do, or how many tokens it decides to spend
• Spend that happened while Orientim wasn't running or wasn't in the path

5. Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit). No macOS or Linux build yet.
• Ports 8000 and 8501, or the next free pair — Orientim moves up if either is taken.
• Free until Orientim has metered $20 of your own spend — the whole product, no card, no clock. The meter only advances while Orientim is working, so it can’t run out while the app sits idle. At $20 it stops passing requests until a licence key is entered; it never carries on with the caps switched off. Nothing you set up is lost.
• One licence activates up to three machines; free a slot yourself with Deactivate this device.
• Your purchase covers this version. Occasional fixes may follow, but ongoing updates aren't promised.

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