Key concepts

The words these docs use, in plain English — read this once and the rest of the docs will make sense.

CoreValue

Term	What it means
AI Gateway	The address your applications send AI requests to, `https://gateway.corevalue.dev`. It passes each request to the provider, sends the answer back unchanged, and records what happened.
AI Governance	Seeing, controlling and reporting on the requests the AI Gateway carries — usage, budgets, access rules, reports and your organisation's settings.
Console	The website where you do all of that: app.corevalue.dev.
Provider	A company whose AI models you call — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq and so on.
Request	One call from your application to a model, such as one chat completion. Every request that goes through the gateway appears on the Requests page.

Who is who

Term	What it means
Organisation	Your company's account in CoreValue. Keys, budgets, members and requests all belong to one organisation. You can belong to more than one and switch between them from the top bar.
Member	A person who can sign in to your organisation's console.
Role	What a member is allowed to do. Owner can do everything (there is one per organisation). Admin can do everything except the owner-only actions, such as transferring ownership. Member can view requests and spend but not change settings. Enterprise organisations can also create custom roles. → Members and roles
Team	A group of members and keys inside your organisation — usually a product team or a service. A team can have its own monthly budget, and its members can be limited to seeing their team's requests. → Teams
Customer	One of your customers — a company or account your product serves. You tell CoreValue which customer a request was for with the `Cova-Customer-Id` header, and can then see and cap spend per customer. Customers never sign in to CoreValue.
End user	A person using your product. You tell CoreValue who with the `Cova-User-Id` header, to see requests per user and to set per-user rate limits. End users never sign in to CoreValue.

Member vs. customer vs. end user. A member is someone at your company using the CoreValue console. A customer and an end user are people on the other side of your product — CoreValue only knows about them because your application names them in a header. → Tag requests with users and customers

Keys

There are two kinds of key, and they go in opposite directions.

Term	What it means
Provider key	Your key from OpenAI, Anthropic or another provider. You add it to CoreValue once, in the console; CoreValue uses it to call the provider for you. Your applications never see it, and the provider bills you directly — this is often called BYOK ("bring your own key"). → Provider keys
CoreValue key	The key your application sends to the gateway, in place of the provider key. It starts `sk-cova-`. It comes in two kinds, below.
API key	A CoreValue key for an application or a person. Its spend counts towards its team's budget and the organisation budget.
Virtual key	A CoreValue key that can also carry its own limits: a monthly spend cap and request-count limits. Give each service its own virtual key when you want to cap that service on its own. It starts `sk-cova-proxy-`.

Both kinds are used the same way: put the key where your SDK expects the provider key, and point the SDK at the gateway. Both are shown once, when you create them — copy them straight away. → API keys and virtual keys

Money and limits

Term	What it means
Cost	What a request cost at the provider's list price, in US dollars. It is shown on every request and returned in the `Cova-Request-Cost` header. → How cost is calculated
Budget	A monthly spending limit for the organisation, a team, a member or a customer. It resets on the 1st of each month.
Cap	A monthly spending limit on a single virtual key.
Action	What happens when a budget is reached: alert (let the request through and tell you), downgrade (switch to a cheaper model) or block (refuse the request). → Budgets & Limits
Rate limit	A limit on how many requests are accepted in a time window, such as 1,000 an hour. It protects against runaway loops rather than overspend. → Rate limits
Breach	A time a budget acted. Every breach is listed in the console.

Tags you can add to a request

Term	What it means
Header	An extra line of information sent with a request. CoreValue's headers all start `Cova-`. → Headers
Property	Any label you choose, sent as `Cova-Property-<Name>: <value>` — for example `Cova-Property-Env: production`. Requests can be filtered by it. For the feature a request was for, use `Cova-Feature-Id` instead: the Spend page breaks cost down by it.