Frequently asked questions

Sign in with GitHub or Google and a key is minted for you — new organisations get ₹100 in free credit. Point your OpenAI base_url at https://api.bharatrouter.com/v1, use that key, and make your first call.

No. BharatRouter speaks the OpenAI wire format, so you change the base URL and API key and keep your SDK and code exactly as they are. It works with any OpenAI SDK (Python, Node, …) and with plain curl. Two optional extras — data_policy and optimize — unlock residency and routing.

Indic and global models behind one API — see the live catalogue at /models for current models, pricing and health. With a saved BYOK key you can also call any model that key serves, beyond the public catalogue, as provider/model.

It reorders the same pool of healthy routes by what you care about. Four modes: price (cheapest, the default), latency (fastest to respond), uptime (lowest failure rate) and auto (balanced — reliability first, then latency and price trade off). Set a default or override it per request.

A hard filter: requests route only to India-resident endpoints. If no India route can serve the request it fails closed rather than leaving the country — DPDP-aligned by construction, not by promise. It sits on top of optimize as a constraint, never a trade-off.

BharatRouter is zero-retention by default (DPDP). A few models require a non-zero upstream data-retention window that conflicts with that posture — for example claude-fable-5, which needs 30-day retention — so they stay non-serving until your organisation opts in. Calling one before opting in returns a 403 model_gated with the exact steps. An owner or admin enables it once at Dashboard → Governance, or programmatically with a management key via PUT /v1/org/data-retention (enabled: true) or the set_data_retention MCP tool. It then applies org-wide and takes effect within about a minute; turn it back off the same way to re-gate those models.

A circuit breaker trips on errors (5xx, timeouts, rate limits) and parks that route, and traffic re-routes automatically to the next healthy step — no code change, no downtime. You can define the order yourself with a saved fallback chain and publish it as a Collection.

Prepaid INR credits at per-token rates — no card kept on file and no surprise bills. Top up with UPI or cards via Razorpay; usage is debited per request and shown in your dashboard.

New organisations get ₹100 in signup credit to try the gateway, and BYOK requests (riding your own provider key) are free during the beta.

Yes — a GST tax invoice (B2C) is issued at top-up: CGST/SGST intra-state or IGST inter-state, SAC 998315, with a gapless invoice number, downloadable from GET /me/invoices. B2B (GSTIN-bearing) invoicing is coming once IRN/e-invoicing is wired.

There is no cap on the number of active keys per organisation. Each key carries its own per-minute rate limit, daily cap, optional monthly ₹ budget and expiry — all editable from the dashboard or via the API.

New orgs start on the trial tier with lower ceilings. An org moves to standard once it has made a payment or carries a positive balance (the ₹100 signup credit counts).

Save a provider key once — encrypted with AES-256-GCM and never shown again — and every request to that provider rides your own account and negotiated rates, with our routing and failover on top. BYOK is required; there is no platform key to fall back to. Free during beta.

Bring your own endpoint: register your own OpenAI-compatible deployment and, after an automated compliance test, use it as a ₹0 fallback step in your routing — your own GPU or hosted model, in the same chain as everything else.

Yes — every human feature has a machine path. There is an MCP server, an llms.txt, an OpenAPI spec, a live-health catalogue, and ephemeral scoped keys an agent can mint for itself. Agents get the same routing, BYOK and collections as the dashboard.

BharatRouter is a developer beta, provided as-is with no SLA or warranty yet — not for production-critical or regulated workloads. Live status is at status.bharatrouter.com.