Share the Tool, Not the Password
I want every person on our team using real SEO and AI-citation data. I do not want every person holding the master DataForSEO password—or one runaway agent eating the entire account balance overnight.
The clean answer is to separate the AI subscription from the paid tool. Everyone keeps an individual Claude, ChatGPT, or Codex account. Those accounts connect to a gateway we control. Google verifies that the member belongs to Local Service Spotlight. The gateway decides which commands exist, how much each one weighs, and whether the member still has budget.
A $50 limit is not the main control
We set a $50 monthly hard ceiling per member, but most people should hit neither it nor the command cap. The practical limit is 200 weighted credits. One live AI citation query costs five credits; a cheaper indexed lookup costs two or three. This makes the allowance describe behavior, not just dollars.
The server knows the real cost
Before a paid command runs, the gateway reserves that tool’s maximum allowed cost. After DataForSEO responds, it records the vendor’s actual task cost and releases the difference. That reservation prevents five simultaneous agents from all seeing the same available balance and spending through it.
We can audit use without reading everyone’s prompts
The ledger records the member, tool, time, credits, cost, duration, result count, and outcome. It stores a SHA-256 hash for duplicate detection but not the prompt text. A short cache makes an identical request free instead of charging the team twice.
This also fixes bad “zero citation” reporting
AI-mention indexes are useful, but they sample prompts with demand. A person’s name can show zero in the index and still appear—along with sources—when you ask the engines live. So our tool gives builders both lanes and requires them to label which one they measured.
We are keeping the pilot internal to verified Local Service Spotlight Google accounts. The setup and policies are published in the member guide, and the implementation lives in the BlitzMetrics skills repository.