feat: route every chat alias to a free OpenRouter model, and halve hive-default and hive-auto

[sakibsadmanshajib]

Owner directive, 2026-08-23: route both hive-default and hive-auto to OpenRouter free models, and charge 50 percent of what is being charged now.

One migration plus one LiteLLM config edit. No Go change on the serving path.

First, a correction to the premise this task was handed with

The brief said hive-auto bills at actual upstream cost after PR #1012, and therefore had to be converted back to a fixed price with the "today" figure recovered from ledger rows.

That is not what #1012 did. It created a new alias, openrouter-auto, on a new route route-openrouter-auto-beta, in pricing_mode = 'upstream_actual'. Its own migration says so out loud: "litellm_model_name is deliberately NOT 'route-openrouter-auto': that name is the retired route id of the pre-existing hive-auto alias, which resolves to a completely different model."

hive-auto was never touched by it. Both aliases are plain fixed rows and have been since the 2026-08-22 restructure, so there is no pricing-mode conversion here and no need to reconstruct a price from ledger magnitudes. The old figures come from the statement that set them.

Before and after

Source for every old rate: supabase/migrations/20260822_02_catalog_alias_restructure.sql step 7.

alias	unit	old rate	new rate	source of old rate
hive-default	credits per million prompt tokens	10500	5250	20260822_02 step 7
hive-default	credits per million completion tokens	42000	21000	20260822_02 step 7
hive-default	credits per million cache-read tokens (published, never billed)	0	0	20260822_02 step 7
hive-default	credits per million cache-write tokens (published, never billed)	0	0	20260822_02 step 7
hive-auto	credits per million prompt tokens	21000	10500	20260822_02 step 7
hive-auto	credits per million completion tokens	84000	42000	20260822_02 step 7
hive-auto	credits per million cache-read tokens (published, never billed)	0	0	20260822_02 step 7
hive-auto	credits per million cache-write tokens (published, never billed)	0	0	20260822_02 step 7

Every figure halves with no remainder, so no rounding rule had to be invented and no float can enter. Both aliases stay pricing_mode = 'fixed' and price_unit = 'tokens'.

Why the cache columns are listed at 0 and not omitted: they are the only other price columns on the row, precedence.go never reads them, and both were already zeroed by 20260822_02 when the aliases moved to Groq routes declaring no cache support. Half of zero is zero, so they are asserted rather than changed. Naming them is the point: "every unit type the alias bills today" is answered exhaustively rather than by omission.

Why there is no Go change

apps/edge-api/internal/metering/precedence.go is the single implementation of the charge arithmetic (D-031). It builds exactly two UnitCharge values per request, prompt tokens at InputPriceCredits and completion tokens at OutputPriceCredits, sums them, divides once by a million and rounds half up. So halving those two columns halves every token charge exactly, for every request shape, with nothing else moving:

• The credit hold does not move, and should not. For a fixed-price alias ReservationCredits returns the flat per-endpoint default (10000 for chat); it only raises a hold above that for an upstream_actual alias. The hold is an authorization, released in full at settlement.
• The fail-closed path halves too. A missing usage block synthesises a token count from response bytes and prices it at the same catalog rate, so it lands at half the old figure rather than at zero or at the old rate.
• Non-token modalities are untouched because they never read these columns. /v1/images/* reserves a hardcoded 5000 credits and internal/audio charges flat literals, both alias-independent (D-033, issue Audio billing ignores the catalog and charges flat hardcoded credits #627). See the residuals.
• Which token classes are billed does not change. Only the rate does. There is a guard for this specifically, because a brief of this shape previously produced a 262x overcharge by widening what was billed.

The money proof: same request shapes, before and after

Produced by calling the production settlement function inference.CreditsForTokens directly, once with the old rates and once with the new ones, in the repo's own toolchain container. Not a reimplementation: that is the function both the streaming and the sync settlement paths call.

Two figures per shape. Exact is quantity times rate, summed, before the single division and round-half-up, which is where "exactly half" is provable. Settled is the whole-credit charge the ledger records, and both sides round independently.

alias	request shape	prompt	completion	old exact (credit-millionths)	new exact	exact ratio	old settled	new settled
hive-default	typical chat turn	1200	400	29400000	14700000	0.500000	29	15
hive-default	long context read	32000	800	369600000	184800000	0.500000	370	185
hive-default	prompt only	1500	0	15750000	7875000	0.500000	16	8
hive-default	completion only	0	900	37800000	18900000	0.500000	38	19
hive-default	tool-call-only turn	850	40	10605000	5302500	0.500000	11	5
hive-default	fail-closed byte estimate	72	1000	42756000	21378000	0.500000	43	21
hive-default	one token each (floor)	1	1	52500	26250	0.500000	1	1
hive-default	24 completion tokens (floor boundary)	0	24	1008000	504000	0.500000	1	1
hive-default	negative counts clamped	-5	-5	0	0	n/a	0	0
hive-auto	typical chat turn	1200	400	58800000	29400000	0.500000	59	29
hive-auto	long context read	32000	800	739200000	369600000	0.500000	739	370
hive-auto	prompt only	1500	0	31500000	15750000	0.500000	32	16
hive-auto	completion only	0	900	75600000	37800000	0.500000	76	38
hive-auto	tool-call-only turn	850	40	21210000	10605000	0.500000	21	11
hive-auto	fail-closed byte estimate	72	1000	85512000	42756000	0.500000	86	43
hive-auto	one token each (floor)	1	1	105000	52500	0.500000	1	1
hive-auto	24 completion tokens (floor boundary)	0	24	2016000	1008000	0.500000	2	1
hive-auto	negative counts clamped	-5	-5	0	0	n/a	0	0

Exactly half on every row, in integer rational arithmetic. Not "roughly half", not a fraction of a percent, not unchanged, and not zero.

Stated rather than smoothed over: the settled whole-credit charge can sit one credit above exactly half, because the old and new charges each round half up independently from exact rationals in a 2 to 1 ratio (29.4 rounds to 29 while 14.7 rounds to 15). The deviation is bounded at one credit, which is 0.00001 USD at the repo's 100000-credits-per-USD constant. The 1-credit floor in CreditsForTokens is the other bounded exception: it is what keeps a sub-credit request off zero, it predates this change, and it is why the two floor rows read 1 and 1. Both are visible in the table rather than hidden behind a "50 percent" claim the integers do not literally satisfy.

The replay enforced its own claims: it failed the run if any exact ratio was not exactly one half, if any new charge was zero where the old was positive, or if any new charge exceeded half by more than one credit.

Full capture, including the commands: docs/proof/free-route-aliases-half-price-2026-08-23/README.md.

The test that fails on the old rate

apps/control-plane/internal/routing/free_alias_pricing_test.go, offline, reusing the SQL parser already in that package. Ten guards, all positional: the migration declares its arithmetic in a -- HALVE| alias | field | old | new table, the test checks that table is arithmetically half, that its OLD column matches the rates actually in force (pinned here so a later edit to 20260822_02 cannot move the baseline), and then that the value each UPDATE assigns equals half. A correct comment above a wrong UPDATE is caught.

Mutation tested rather than asserted to work. Six mutations, six kills, control green:

mutation	result
M1 revert hive-default input to the old 10500	FAIL TestFreeAliasPricesAreExactlyHalfTheOldRates
M2 hive-default output 21000 becomes hive-auto's 10500	FAIL TestFreeAliasPricesAreExactlyHalfTheOldRates
M3 route-free-auto loses supports_batch and both image flags	FAIL TestFreeRouteAutoCarriesTheSoleCapabilityFlagsForward
M4 provider_model loses the :free suffix	FAIL TestFreeAliasRoutesTargetAFreeOpenRouterModel
M5 route-free-default loses tools_supported	FAIL TestFreeRoutesKeepTheCapabilitiesTheirAliasesServeToday
M6 the retired Groq routes left enabled	FAIL TestRetiredGroqRoutesAreDisabledAndRepointed

M1 is the guard the brief asked for: red on the old rate, green on the new one.

The existing TestCatalogAliasPricesMatchProviderRates cannot cover these two prices, and that is structural rather than an oversight. It derives every credit figure as usd_per_million * 1.4 * 100000 (D-032), and its parseRate refuses a zero rate outright: "that is a mispricing, not a rate". A free upstream costs zero, so the margin formula yields zero, and zero is refused by SelectRoute as unpriceable. These two prices are owner-set, not cost-derived, and the halving relation is what replaces the formula as the checkable invariant.

Routing: which free model, chosen from live data

https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models, fetched 2026-08-23: 422 models, 22 priced at zero on both prompt and completion. A literal openrouter/free id does exist; it is a router, not a model.

The capability bar comes from what these aliases serve today. Both current routes declare tools_supported = true, which is the column PR #206 routes tools, tool_choice and response_format on, plus supports_streaming and supports_reasoning. Of the 22 free models, five support all of tools, tool_choice, response_format and structured outputs. Joined to https://openrouter.ai/api/frontend/v1/all-providers:

free model	provider	trains on prompts	retention
dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free	AtlasCloud	no	retains, period not published
z-ai/glm-5.2:free	Decart	no	zero retention
nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b:free	NVIDIA	YES	retains
nvidia/nemotron-nano-9b-v2:free	NVIDIA	YES	retains
liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:free	Liquid	YES	retains

A false green I shipped and then caught, recorded so the next person does not repeat it: the endpoints API reports NVIDIA's provider as Nvidia while the provider directory keys it under displayName NVIDIA. Joining on displayName alone misses the record and reports every NVIDIA free endpoint as no-training and zero-retention, the exact opposite of the truth. Join on both fields.

Live probes with the project's real key, and this is where the paper ranking fell apart:

• z-ai/glm-5.2:free, the only zero-retention candidate and the strongest model on every published axis: 429 on four of four attempts, provider_error_code: upstream_429, limit_source: upstream_provider_shared_pool. That is Decart's shared pool, not our account's limit, and buying credits cannot raise it. Rejected on live evidence rather than on paper.
• openrouter/free with no provider preference: five of five succeeded, but four landed on NVIDIA endpoints and two of five landed on nvidia/nemotron-3.5-content-safety:free, a moderation classifier, which answered a plain chat prompt with User Safety: safe and then with an empty string. Unfit for a chat alias on output quality alone, before the training question. This is also the exact shape issue hive-default and hive-auto route through OpenRouter's random free-model router, not the models their catalog prices are derived from #689 called a bug.
• openrouter/free with provider: {data_collection: "deny"}: five of five, only Cohere and AtlasCloud, tool calls on five of five. The deny filter empirically excludes every NVIDIA endpoint and the classifier.
• provider: {zdr: true}, the stricter form: 404, "No endpoints found matching your data policy (Zero data retention)". There is no zero-data-retention free endpoint reachable at all today.
• dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free: 200 on a sync completion, on a tools request (a real tool_calls with correct arguments and finish_reason: tool_calls), on response_format: {"type":"json_object"} (valid JSON back) and on a streamed request. cost: 0 on every response.

Chosen: dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free for both aliases, pinned, with extra_body.provider.data_collection: deny and allow_fallbacks: false. It is the only free model that is simultaneously full parity, live verified working, and served by a provider that does not train on prompts. The deny preference is kept even though the model resolves to one provider today: if AtlasCloud's policy changes or a second provider appears, the request fails instead of quietly moving customer prompts to a provider that stores them.

Capability parity verdict

capability	before (Groq gpt-oss)	after (free model)	verdict
tools, tool_choice	declared, supported	declared, live verified with a real tool call	parity
response_format, structured outputs	routed on tools_supported	supported, live verified returning valid JSON	parity
streaming	declared	declared, live verified, 20 chunks	parity
reasoning / reasoning_effort	declared	declared, model enables reasoning by default	parity
chat completions, completions, responses	declared	declared	parity
embeddings	false	false	unchanged
cache read, cache write	false	false	unchanged, no cache rate published
batch, image generation, image edit	on route-groq-auto only	carried onto route-free-auto	preserved, see below
vision (image input)	none reachable	upstream is text+image->text	not declared, see below

Two notes on that table. provider_capabilities has no vision column, so the free model's image-input support is an undeclared property of the upstream rather than a new product claim; the 2026-08-22 note that no customer-reachable vision path exists is now inaccurate at the upstream level and the config comment says so. And the three media flags are a documented status-quo fiction inherited through two migrations: neither gpt-4.1-mini, nor gpt-oss-120b, nor this model generates images. They are carried because route-groq-auto is their sole carrier in the catalog, SelectRoute hard-filters on each flag, and batchstore sends NeedBatch = true for every batch, so disabling it without handing them on would leave /v1/batches, /v1/images/generations and /v1/images/edits with zero eligible routes for every alias in the system. M3 above is the guard.

Under-claiming is not a safe default here: both aliases are pinned to exactly one route, so matchesRequestedCapabilities drops the only candidate, SelectRoute returns ErrRouteNotEligible and writeRoutingError maps it to 422. On a pinned alias an under-claim is a failed request, not a withheld feature.

Rate limits, and what a user sees at the cap

Documented (https://openrouter.ai/docs/api_reference/limits.md, whose MDX constants resolve to real numbers): free variants are capped at 20 requests per minute, and at 50 per day below 10 dollars of lifetime credit purchases or 1000 per day at or above it. GET /api/v1/key reports is_free_tier: false for this account and project memory records a 10 dollar purchase, so 1000 per day is the expected tier. The key endpoint does not expose the purchased total, so that is an expectation, not a measurement; its own rate_limit field is documented as deprecated and returns requests: -1. Separately and more sharply, the Decart 429 shows a per-provider shared pool can refuse everything regardless of our standing.

What a customer sees at the cap today: a roughly 60 second wait and then a 502 whose message is context canceled. That is issue #1089, filed today and unchanged by this work. num_retries: 3 with request_timeout: 45 retries a rate-limited deployment three times, the SDK suites time out at 60 seconds, and the provider's own 429 with its retry hint never leaves the LiteLLM container log.

Not fixed here, and the reason is containment rather than appetite. The candidate fix (router_settings.retry_policy.RateLimitErrorRetries: 0) belongs in the litellm_settings block, which the config sync preserves verbatim on a live volume. A file edit there is inert on the box and cannot be verified from a developer machine with no SSH to it. #1089 reaches the same conclusion about itself and asks for a real reproduction. This change does make it materially more likely, since 20 requests per minute is much tighter than Groq's ceiling, so its priority moves from latent to likely.

Mitigation that does exist: hive-small and hive-medium stay on Groq and are now the only customer-reachable Groq chat routes besides the deprecated hive-fast. A rate-limited customer has a working alternative, but has to select it; nothing routes them there, because the gateway chat fallbacks were removed deliberately in 20260822_02 and re-adding one is the same inert-on-a-live-volume problem.

Logging and training terms

• OpenRouter itself stores no prompts or completions unless the account opts in, and both opt-ins (private input/output logging, and letting OpenRouter use inputs/outputs for a 1 percent discount) are off by default. Request metadata (token counts, latency) is always retained.
• AtlasCloud, serving the chosen model: training: false, retainsPrompts: true, no retention period published.
• The route carries provider.data_collection: deny as a fail-closed guard.
• The contradiction, written down because this product sells data sovereignty: a strict zero-retention posture is not achievable on any free OpenRouter endpoint today, proved by the zdr: true 404. The best available free posture is a provider that does not train but does retain for an unpublished period. The owner directed the move with this on the record.

Why new route ids rather than repointing the two Groq rows

The same reason 20260822_02 gave, and it applies in this direction too. The LiteLLM config sync merges field by field: the database owns only model, api_base and api_key, and every other key already on the entry survives so that hand-tuning sticks (mergeParams, issue #707). Retiring the route id makes the merge drop the whole stale entry, because a known route_id that is no longer active is deleted rather than updated. The rows are disabled, not deleted, so the change is reversible and SelectRoute filters them out.

price_class stays standard, identical to the routes being replaced. budget would arguably describe a free upstream better, but price_class feeds allow_price_class_widening, and keeping the same value means this repoint cannot change selection behaviour through a second mechanism.

The api_key follows automatically from providers.api_key_env for the row's provider slug, so openrouter resolves to OPENROUTER_API_KEY without the migration naming a secret. The doubled openrouter/ prefix on provider_model is correct: LiteLLM strips the leading one as its provider selector, exactly as openrouter/~deepseek/... and openrouter/openrouter/auto-beta already do. The trailing :free is load-bearing, not cosmetic: dropping it selects a paid endpoint of the same model, so the alias would charge a halved price against a real out-of-pocket cost and nothing else in the tree would notice. M4 is the guard.

Verification

• go test ./apps/control-plane/... -count=1 -short: clean, no FAIL, no panic.
• go test ./apps/edge-api/... -count=1 -short: clean, no FAIL, no panic.
• New guards, verbose: 10 of 10 pass; 6 of 6 mutations kill a guard.
• npm run lint:litellm-config: PASS. npm run lint:litellm-routing: PASS. npm run lint:proof-tokens: ok, 137 files scanned.
• deploy/litellm/config.yaml parses and resolves 14 model entries, with both new routes carrying the intended extra_body.

Not proved, and it matters: that the running gateway serves the new route. The config is volume-seeded and the live change arrives through POST /internal/litellm/sync reading provider_routes. There is no SSH to the demo box from here and CI is the only remote hands, so the on-box confirmation belongs to the deploy run. deploy-demo-box.yml's "Assert model catalog prices agree with the model LiteLLM will call" step is the check that catches a stale volume, and its predicate (pricing_mode = 'upstream_actual' OR input_price_credits > 0) covers both of these rows. No ledger row at the new price exists yet either; that needs a served request after the migration applies.

No screenshot, because this change alters no UI surface. The console catalog table renders whatever price the API returns, and the two figures it will show are the ones proved above.

Residual questions for the owner

Both are stated rather than silently resolved, per the brief.

1. hive-auto now costs exactly twice hive-default for the identical model. Both resolve to the same free upstream, so the surviving 2x gap buys the customer nothing. The directive fixes each alias at 50 percent of its own old price, which is what shipped; equalising them is a separate decision. Options: (a) leave as is, honest to the directive, indefensible to a customer who compares them; (b) equalise hive-auto to 5250 and 21000, a further reduction that cannot overcharge anyone; (c) give hive-auto a distinct larger free model. Recommendation: (b). Option (c) is blocked today: every other full-parity free model is served by a provider that trains on prompts, and the one zero-retention candidate returns 429 on every request.

2. The image path is not halved. /v1/images/generations and /v1/images/edits reserve and settle a hardcoded 5000 credits that never reads the alias price, so an image request through hive-auto is billed the same as before. It is also not actually servable, since the upstream is a text model and those capability flags have been a documented fiction since 20260414_01. Options: (a) halve the literal to 2500, which halves it for every other alias too and so exceeds this directive's scope; (b) leave it and close the fiction under issue Audio billing ignores the catalog and charges flat hardcoded credits #627; (c) drop the flags, which deletes three endpoints catalog-wide. Recommendation: (b).

Buglog entry

{"id":"bug-2026-08-23-openrouter-provider-name-vs-displayname-join","date":"2026-08-23","title":"Joining OpenRouter endpoint provider_name against all-providers displayName silently reports a training provider as zero-retention","error_message":"A capability-and-data-policy scan of OpenRouter's free models reported every NVIDIA free endpoint as training:false, retainsPrompts:false, when NVIDIA's published policy is training:true, retainsPrompts:true","root_cause":"GET /api/v1/models/{slug}/endpoints reports the provider in its `name` form (`Nvidia`) while GET /api/frontend/v1/all-providers keys the record by `displayName` (`NVIDIA`). 18 of 82 providers have name != displayName. A dictionary keyed on displayName therefore misses the lookup entirely, and a default of an empty policy object reads as no-training and zero-retention rather than as unknown, so the failure presents as the safest possible answer instead of an error. The scan looked authoritative and was inverted on exactly the axis a data-sovereignty product cares about.","fix":"Key the provider lookup on both `name` and `displayName`, and treat a missing policy as UNKNOWN rather than as permissive. Re-ran the scan: only two of five full-capability free models are served by non-training providers, not four. Also verified the conclusion independently against live behaviour: with provider.data_collection deny set, five of five requests routed away from every NVIDIA endpoint, which agrees with the corrected join and contradicts the original one.","tags":["openrouter","data-policy","sovereignty","false-green","join-key-mismatch","provider-catalog"]}

---

Part two: the remaining Groq text routes, at prices deliberately unchanged

Second owner directive the same day, folded into this PR because it touches the same catalog rows and the same deploy/litellm/config.yaml, so a separate PR would conflict by construction.

Move the Groq TEXT and chat-completion models to OpenRouter free as well, to stop the Groq free-tier allowance being drained.

Shipped as a second migration, 20260823_21_groq_text_routes_to_openrouter_free.sql, deliberately separate from the repricing one. Splitting them is what makes "no price moves here" a structural property of a file rather than a claim in its header.

Prices for these three do NOT change, and that is the intended outcome

alias	unit	rate before	rate after	note
hive-small	credits per million prompt / completion tokens	10500 / 42000	10500 / 42000	unchanged
hive-medium	credits per million prompt / completion tokens	21000 / 84000	21000 / 84000	unchanged
hive-fast	credits per million prompt / completion tokens	10500 / 42000	10500 / 42000	unchanged, deprecated alias

The owner's 50 percent instruction applies to hive-default and hive-auto only. Serving a same-priced alias from a free upstream widens margin, and that is intended. Stated explicitly so no later reader mistakes it for an oversight, and enforced two ways rather than promised:

• TestGroqFreeRepointTouchesNoPrice fails if that migration assigns any of input_price_credits, output_price_credits, either cache column, pricing_mode or price_unit. The migration does not write model_aliases at all, so the guard holds in its strongest form.
• The DB-level check reads the prices back after the whole chain applies, and they are byte for byte what they were.

hive-fast's cache columns stay at 1 and 4, the stale OpenRouter-era values 20260822_02 examined and deliberately left alone so a deprecated alias would not be repriced on any axis. Not touched here either, for the same reason.

Audio is out of scope, and the survey behind that

route-groq-stt (whisper-large-v3) and route-groq-tts (Orpheus) are untouched, and TestGroqFreeRepointLeavesAudioOnGroq fails if that migration so much as names them in an executable statement. GROQ_API_KEY stays required; what Groq no longer serves is chat.

"OpenRouter has no audio" would have been an overstatement, so here is the actual picture across all 422 models:

• Text to speech: nothing usable. Not one model, free or paid, advertises supported_voices. The only entries with audio in their output modality are google/lyria-3-pro-preview and google/lyria-3-clip-preview (free, MUSIC generation, no voice selection) and openai/gpt-audio and openai/gpt-audio-mini (PAID, speech-to-speech chat). None is an OpenAI-compatible /v1/audio/speech endpoint, which is what internal/audio speaks. Orpheus has no replacement at any price.
• Speech to text: three free models take audio as chat input (thinkingmachines/inkling:free, thinkingmachines/inkling-small:free, nvidia/nemotron-3-nano-omni-30b-a3b-reasoning:free). They are not a transcription endpoint: they are chat-completions models, while route-groq-stt is a LiteLLM mode: audio_transcription route that edge-api's audio handler forwards multipart audio to. Using one would be a new integration, not a repoint. All three are also served by providers whose published policy is training on prompts, a poor destination for dictated speech specifically.

Reported, not acted on, exactly as the directive asked. Bengali voice dictation (PR #1079) keeps working.

Capability parity, probed live because the parameter lists differ

This one genuinely needed checking rather than asserting. dots-3-note-preview lists tools, tool_choice, response_format, structured_outputs, reasoning, include_reasoning, max_tokens, temperature and top_p, and does not list reasoning_effort, stop, frequency_penalty, presence_penalty, seed, top_k or logprobs. The Groq gpt-oss models it replaces accept several of those. So: does an unlisted parameter fail, or is it ignored?

Twelve request shapes, live:

request shape	result
baseline	200
reasoning_effort=low	200
reasoning_effort=high	200
stop	200
frequency_penalty	200
presence_penalty	200
seed	200
top_k	200
logprobs + top_logprobs	200
n=2	200
response_format json_schema, strict	200
reasoning_effort + provider.require_parameters	200

All twelve returned 200 with a correct answer. There is no request shape that works today and fails after the repoint, which is the regression this check exists to rule out. The require_parameters case is the interesting one: OpenRouter considers reasoning_effort satisfied by this endpoint even under strict parameter enforcement.

Two behavioural differences that are not failures, recorded so nobody files them as new bugs:

• reasoning_effort is accepted and never rejected, but does not reliably modulate effort: low produced more reasoning tokens than high in the same run. Requests keep working; the knob stops being meaningful.
• n=2 returns one choice. That is OpenRouter's existing behaviour for a provider that does not implement n, identical on the routes being replaced.

Capability FLAGS are carried across per route rather than uniformly. route-free-small and route-free-medium mirror their Groq originals including supports_reasoning = true; route-free-fast keeps supports_reasoning = false, which is status-quo preservation of an under-claim route-groq-fast has carried since its original 20260331_02 seed and that 20260822_02 examined and deliberately left alone. Widening it would be safe, but a routing migration is not where a deprecated alias should quietly gain a feature.

None of these three is a sole carrier of a media flag, so disabling them removes no endpoint. TestRepointedGroqTextRoutesKeepTheirCapabilities asserts both directions: the flags they must have, and that they claim none of the three media flags that belong on route-free-auto.

Concentration risk, stated rather than buried

After this change every customer-reachable chat alias except the two paid DeepSeek ones resolves to ONE model at ONE provider on ONE free endpoint. Five aliases: hive-default, hive-auto, hive-small, hive-medium, hive-fast. There are no gateway fallbacks, by deliberate design (20260822_02 removed them because a fallback answers from a model the alias was not priced against).

So the failure mode moves rather than disappearing. OpenRouter documents free variants at 20 requests per minute, and 50 or 1000 per day depending on lifetime credit purchases; that per-minute ceiling is tighter than the Groq daily allowance this was meant to escape. Separately, the Decart 429 recorded in part one shows an upstream provider shared pool can refuse everything regardless of our account standing, and buying credits cannot raise it.

It also removes the mitigation part one could still point at. An hour ago a rate-limited customer could select hive-small and land on a different provider. There is no such alias now.

What a demo user sees at the cap is unchanged: a roughly 60 second wait and then a 502 whose message is context canceled, never the provider's own 429 with its retry hint. That is issue #1089. Not fixed here for the containment reason given in part one: the candidate fix lives in the litellm_settings block the config sync preserves verbatim, so a file edit is inert on a live box and cannot be verified from a developer machine with no SSH to it. This change raises that issue's priority from latent to likely.

This does not close issue #1088. That is CI consuming the live demo's provider allowance, a different cause with a different owner, and there is deliberately no Fixes #1088 line anywhere in this PR.

Part two verification: the full migration chain on a real Postgres

Not a file-parsing claim this time. A throwaway pgvector/pgvector:pg17 container on its own port, seeded with .github/ci/test-db-bootstrap.sql and then every file in supabase/migrations/ in order, exactly as .github/workflows/ci.yml does it. Container removed afterwards. all migrations applied, no error.

Read back from that database:

   alias_id   | in_credits | out_credits |     route_id       |  provider  |                provider_model
--------------+------------+-------------+--------------------+------------+-------------------------------------------------
 hive-auto    |      10500 |       42000 | route-free-auto    | openrouter | openrouter/dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free
 hive-default |       5250 |       21000 | route-free-default | openrouter | openrouter/dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free
 hive-fast    |      10500 |       42000 | route-free-fast    | openrouter | openrouter/dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free
 hive-medium  |      21000 |       84000 | route-free-medium  | openrouter | openrouter/dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free
 hive-small   |      10500 |       42000 | route-free-small   | openrouter | openrouter/dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free
 hive-stt     |          0 |     4316667 | route-groq-stt     | groq       | groq/whisper-large-v3
 hive-tts     |          0 |     3080000 | route-groq-tts     | groq       | groq/canopylabs/orpheus-v1-english

Also confirmed against that database:

• One enabled route per alias. The violations query returns exactly one row, hive-embedding-default with 3, which is the pre-existing exception the integration suite already records in pendingMultiRouteAliases.
• The three batch and image flags have a healthy carrier, route-free-auto. supports_stt and supports_tts are still on the two healthy Groq audio routes. So /v1/batches, /v1/images/generations, /v1/images/edits and both voice endpoints still find an eligible route.
• policy_mode moved on no alias. hive-fast is still latency, hive-small and hive-medium still pinned, hive-default still stability, hive-auto still weighted. Only the route name inside fallback_order changed.
• Idempotent. Both new migrations re-applied to the same database a second time, both clean, prices identical afterwards.
• Integration suite green against that database: internal/routing, internal/catalog and internal/litellmconfig all ok with -tags integration.

Running the whole ./apps/control-plane/... integration suite at once also produced failures in auditworker, marketplace and tenants. Those are package-parallelism collisions on one shared database, not this change: each passes on its own against the same database, and none of them reads any of the four tables this branch touches.

Two test-file notes a reviewer should see rather than discover

• TestHiveFastIsPinnedToGroqAtCorrectedPrice is renamed to TestHiveFastIsPinnedToOneRouteAtItsUnchangedPrice and its provider and provider_model expectations updated, because the route legitimately moved. Its two price assertions (10500 and 42000) are unchanged and are now the DB-level guard that this repoint did not quietly reprice three aliases. Its comment records that these figures are no longer derivable from the upstream's cost, which is zero, and must not be "corrected" to match it.
• TestSelectRouteHiveFastResolvesToGroqAtGroqPrice in service_test.go keeps a name that no longer describes the catalog. It is a stub-driven test of the SelectRoute algorithm with synthetic route fixtures; it reads neither the database nor any migration, so it is still a valid algorithm test. Left alone rather than renamed in an unrelated file. Push back if you would rather it were renamed.

Residual question three, added by part two

There is now no chat alias on a second provider. With every free-model alias behind one 20-requests-per-minute endpoint and no fallbacks, a single upstream 429 takes the whole chat surface down for that minute. Options: (a) leave it, which is what the directive literally asks for; (b) keep one Groq chat route as a deliberate escape hatch, cheapest candidate being the deprecated hive-fast, which costs almost nothing in Groq allowance and preserves a working alias to switch to; (c) fix #1089 first so at least the failure is a fast, correct 429 a client library can back off from. Recommendation: (c) then (b). Not done here because #1089's fix is not containable from this environment, per the reasoning above.

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📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between efd507a and 5227171.

📒 Files selected for processing (7)

• .env.example
• apps/control-plane/internal/routing/catalog_pricing_integration_test.go
• apps/control-plane/internal/routing/free_alias_pricing_test.go
• deploy/litellm/config.yaml
• docs/proof/free-route-aliases-half-price-2026-08-23/README.md
• supabase/migrations/20260823_20_free_route_aliases_half_price.sql
• supabase/migrations/20260823_21_groq_text_routes_to_openrouter_free.sql

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