Projects
Projects are isolated workspaces within your organisation. Creating a project requires a Cloud plan or above. Community orgs authenticate with an org-wide API key instead, with no project required. They exist to give different teams or products their own:
When to use projects
| Scenario | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Multiple products sharing one AICP account | One project per product |
| Different teams with different provider access | One project per team |
| Dev / staging / production separation | Environments within one project |
| Cost isolation between workloads | One project per workload with its own budget |
Project-scoped API keys
A key created for a project can only access that project's resources and makes chat requests using that project's routing and provider config, so you can give a team an API key without granting access to other projects.
Environments
Environments let you run dev and production workloads in the same project without spinning up separate projects. Each environment gets its own slug (e.g. dev, staging, prod) and can be marked as production.
Budget enforcement
When a project's monthly budget is exhausted and hard_limit: true is set, the gateway returns 402 Payment Required for new requests to that project. Alerts fire at the configured percentage threshold.
Relationship to org-level config
Project settings override org-level settings for requests authenticated with a project-scoped key:
Org routing strategy: latency
Project routing strategy: cost ← this wins for project-scoped requests
Requests authenticated with an org-level key use org-level settings unless explicitly routed to a project.