For developers. Two URLs. One key.

An AI agent control plane governs the model and tool calls an agent makes. Obol authenticates each call, checks policy before dispatch, keeps vendor credentials in its vault, and records the result. Your agent keeps its own runtime; Obol enforces permissions, approvals and spending limits on the traffic it receives.

An Obol virtual key identifies the agent. Cedar policies decide which tools it may call and which arguments are allowed, with default-deny authorization before dispatch. A support policy can allow github.create_issue only in named repositories, hold every stripe.create_refund in prod for a person's approval, and never permit deleting a customer record. Tools the key cannot call stay out of tools/list. See the MCP gateway access controls.

Yes. Obol provides an OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway on /v1 and an MCP gateway on /mcp. Your apps and coding agents use one Obol key for model and tool calls, with shared permissions, spending limits and audit history. You keep your model provider accounts and pay those providers directly. The quickstart shows the connection setup.

No. The inbound credential is never the outbound one: the agent holds an Obol key, and your vendor credentials sit envelope-encrypted in the vault, each under its own AES-256-GCM key wrapped by a KEK in AWS KMS on Obol Cloud or a local age key on Free Self-hosted. They are decrypted only inside the gateway process and injected on the outbound hop, never into logs or the dashboard.

On some routes, and the receipt always names which. Natively, Obol makes the request with your vaulted credential and reads the vendor's response on its own socket: that is gateway_observed, the only evidence class that earns the word proves. An imported MCP server answers for itself, so its calls are recorded as untrusted. On a federated route your broker makes the call, so the receipt labels what came back untrusted and refuses to call it verified; federated activation is not self-serve yet. Only a later, independently authenticated source can raise it: the vendor's own signed webhook, checked at Obol's edge.

Nothing executes. A tool the key may not call never appears in tools/list, and any call that arrives anyway meets Cedar, default-deny, with argument conditions. We never guarantee the model picks the right tool, only that the wrong one cannot run.

New calls stop within a minute. The gateway caches a key's state for at most 30 seconds, and a revoked or expired key is refused with key_revoked or key_expired. To stop every agent in a workspace at once, use the workspace switch: calls are refused with workspace_frozen.

No, Obol is not a cheaper OpenRouter and resells no customer model traffic. You keep your provider accounts and pay them directly; Obol governs the calls across them with one key, one policy, and one audit log. Obol's service-only Copilot route is separate: Obol funds its bounded workspace allowance, and customer traffic cannot select it. The built-in tools Obol operates itself are another exception: each has its own published price per action, in cents.

Built-in tools are rolling out to Obol Cloud, and image generation is coming. Each action has a fixed price, in cents: web search 1¢, read a web page 0.5¢, generate an image 2¢, and read text in an image 0.5¢. Obol runs open-source software where it can (SearXNG, Scrapling, Tesseract OCR) and calls a cheaper hosted API on its own account where that wins (MuAPI). Your query, page address or prompt goes to that named source. Included each month, shared across your organization: $20.00 on Obol Cloud, $1.00 during the $1 trial. After that, calls draw on your prepaid balance if you have one, with no automatic overage. Each call also counts as one tool call. Built-in tools stay default-deny until your policy allows them, and the action to generate an image waits for an approval in prod unless your policy grants it. Workspaces that existed before built-in tools start with them off until an admin turns them on. Your own vendor connections are still billed by the vendor, at your rate. The usage pricing page lists every action with its source and price.

The same control plane as Obol Cloud, on your own Docker Compose host, installed with one command, for $0 in Obol fees and with no Obol call quota. You operate it and bring your own credentials; there is no SLA. Obol Workers and built-in tools are Obol Cloud services. They are not part of Free Self-hosted. Obol Workers is in early access. Contracted support and Kubernetes, VPC, or air-gapped deployments are Enterprise discussions, confirmed before they enter a contract. Install it.

For models: /v1/chat/completions with SSE streaming, /v1/messages and /v1/embeddings. For tools: /mcp over Streamable HTTP.

Any client that speaks Streamable HTTP and can send an Authorization: Bearer header: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code and the MCP Inspector have guided setup in the dashboard. Obol's MCP uses a virtual key, not a browser OAuth sign-in from the client.