OpenRouter Spend

Prerequisites

• An OpenRouter account at openrouter.ai with at least $1 of credit (free signup, free trial credits available).
• An app that's already calling OpenRouter (or that you can switch to OpenRouter - it's drop-in OpenAI-compatible).
• Chirp installed on your phone, signed in.

Setup

1. 1

   Install the Chirp SDK

   Pick the language matching your app. The SDK is dependency-light: stdlib HTTP for Python, fetch for Node. No external package weight.

   shell

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   pip install chirp-sdk
   # or:
   npm install chirp

2. 2

   Authenticate with `chirp login`

   Opens a browser, pairs your machine with your Chirp account, drops a token at ~/.chirprc. The SDK auto-discovers it. You only do this once per laptop. Crucially, your OpenRouter API key is never asked for or sent - the SDK only uses your Chirp credentials to push token-count + cost telemetry.

   shell

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   chirp login

3. 3

   Wrap your OpenRouter client

   OpenRouter speaks the OpenAI Chat Completions wire format, so most apps already use the official openai package pointed at OpenRouter's base URL. Pass that client through chirp.openrouter.track() - it returns a thin proxy that intercepts every response, reads usage.cost + usage.prompt_tokens + usage.completion_tokens + the model field, and POSTs them to Chirp asynchronously. Your call site is unchanged.

   main.py

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   from openai import OpenAI
   import chirp.openrouter
   
   client = OpenAI(
       base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1",
       api_key=OPENROUTER_API_KEY,
   )
   client = chirp.openrouter.track(client)
   
   # All your existing call sites work unchanged.
   response = client.chat.completions.create(
       model="anthropic/claude-3-5-sonnet",
       messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "hello"}],
   )

4. 4

   (Optional) Tag calls for project-level breakdowns

   Pass a chirp_tag extra header on the request to bucket spend by project, customer, or feature. The dashboard's daily summary endpoint exposes per-tag totals for billing reconciliation.

   python

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   response = client.chat.completions.create(
       model="anthropic/claude-3-5-sonnet",
       messages=[...],
       extra_headers={"chirp_tag": "rag-pipeline"},
   )

Raw HTTP (no SDK)

# After your OpenRouter call returns, POST the usage fields verbatim:
curl -X POST https://api.chirpapp.dev/v1/openrouter-usage \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CHIRP_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "anthropic/claude-3-5-sonnet",
    "prompt_tokens": 1240,
    "completion_tokens": 320,
    "cost": 0.0145
  }'

Troubleshooting

The card shows $0.00 even though my code is calling OpenRouter.

Verify usage.cost is present in the response: print(response.usage). If it's missing, you're hitting the upstream provider directly (not OpenRouter) - check your base_url is https://openrouter.ai/api/v1 and the API key starts with sk-or-.

I'm seeing 401s in my logs from Chirp.

chirp login token expired. Re-run chirp login. Tokens are valid for 90 days; the SDK falls back to silent failure (your LLM call still succeeds) if telemetry can't be sent - your app never breaks because of Chirp.

The daily total isn't matching my OpenRouter dashboard.

Chirp uses UTC midnight for the daily rollover; OpenRouter's dashboard may show your local timezone's day. Compare against OpenRouter's hourly breakdown for an apples-to-apples figure.

Per-provider chips show "unknown" instead of "Anthropic".

OpenRouter's model field is provider/model (e.g. anthropic/claude-3-5-sonnet). If you're calling a custom or fine-tuned model that lacks the prefix, the wrapper falls back to grouping under "openrouter". Pass an explicit provider kwarg to chirp.openrouter.report() if you need to override.