> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://xerg.ai/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# QM pricing coverage

> Understand observed, estimated, and unavailable cost for QM and OpenRouter auto.

QM pricing follows a fail-closed authority order:

1. A finite positive QM cost is `observed`.
2. Zero or negative QM cost is never observed money.
3. A non-positive row is estimated only when its requested provider/model is explicit, deterministic, and present in Xerg's date-aware catalog.
4. Otherwise the observation is `unpriced`.

`openrouter/auto` is always unpriced unless QM eventually records the actual routed response model. Xerg does not guess a route. The negative placeholder values currently seen in QM are diagnostic only: tokens and cache buckets remain, but the values are excluded from known spend, savings, and identified-waste dollars.

Because the current QM contract cannot distinguish a legitimate free-model zero from missing cost, Xerg says `cost unavailable`, not `free` or `actual cost $0`.

## Certification cohorts

Release acceptance uses two separate staging workloads:

* An explicit deterministic model with at least 95% priced token share, at least 95% priced underlying-request share, nonzero known spend, exact token-bucket reconciliation where QM exposes the authoritative buckets, and no negative value classified as observed.
* An `openrouter/auto` workload with no placeholder spend priced, all token/cache evidence retained, and monetary thresholds exiting `5`.

Setup never changes the production QM organization's default model. A staging canary may select an explicit model only inside its private scope and only when a serviceable provider credential is already available through QM's secret manager.

Xerg runtime economics are not provider-invoice reconciliation. Use `pricingCoverage` in JSON output and the report notes to decide whether a monetary comparison is defensible.