Setting Up MonoRouter for Your Development Team

MonoRouter works great for individual developers, but it really shines with teams. The Team plan ($99/mo) pools your subscription across up to 5 seats, with per-member caps, roles, and an audit log — everyone gets a key that draws from the same pool of connected provider tokens.

This guide walks through a full team setup — from subscribing to verifying that every developer is routing through MonoRouter.

Step 1: Subscribe to the Team Plan

Sign up at monorouter.com/signup with your email (or Google) if you don't already have an account, then go to monorouter.com/billing and subscribe to Team ($99/mo). This is the account that will own the team — it manages the session pool, seats, and billing.

Step 2: Create the Team

Head to monorouter.com/team. With an active Team subscription, you'll see a create your team form — give it a name and you're the owner.

Step 3: Invite Your Members

From the team page, invite up to 4 more people (5 seats total, including you) by email. Each invite gets a role:

• Admin — can invite/remove members and manage the pool
• Member — can use the pool but can't manage the team

Invited members get an email invite link; once they accept, they're on the team and their API keys draw from the pool.

Step 4: Connect Claude Accounts to the Pool

Each team member (or the owner, depending on how you want to organize it) connects a Claude subscription to MonoRouter's session pool. The more accounts connected, the higher the team's collective throughput — MonoRouter distributes requests across all connected sessions using least-connections routing.

You can mix subscription tiers — some members on Pro ($20/mo), others on Max ($100/mo). Max accounts get slightly more traffic because they have higher rate limits, but Pro accounts contribute meaningfully to the pool.

Step 5: Distribute API Keys

Head to the Keys page in the dashboard and generate a key for each developer or shared service:

• mr_live_alice_dev — Alice's local development
• mr_live_bob_dev — Bob's local development
• mr_live_ci_review — CI pipeline for code reviews
• mr_live_ci_tests — CI pipeline for test generation

Naming keys per developer/service (rather than sharing one key everywhere) makes it easy to see per-key usage in the dashboard and to revoke a single key — useful when someone leaves the team or a CI key leaks — without touching anyone else's access. Each member's key is also subject to their per-member monthly cap, which the owner or an admin can set on the team page to keep any one person from consuming the whole pool.

Step 6: Configure Developer Environments

Each developer adds two environment variables. Here's how to set it up for different shells:

Bash (~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile):

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="mr_live_alice_dev"
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://api.monorouter.com/v1"

Zsh (~/.zshrc):

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="mr_live_alice_dev"
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://api.monorouter.com/v1"

Fish (~/.config/fish/config.fish):

set -gx ANTHROPIC_API_KEY "mr_live_alice_dev"
set -gx ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL "https://api.monorouter.com/v1"

Windows PowerShell ($PROFILE):

$env:ANTHROPIC_API_KEY = "mr_live_alice_dev"
$env:ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL = "https://api.monorouter.com/v1"

From that point, every tool that uses the Anthropic SDK — Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, custom scripts — routes through MonoRouter. No per-tool configuration needed.

Step 7: Set Up a Shared .env.example

For projects that use dotenv files, add a template to your repo so new team members get started immediately:

# .env.example — copy to .env and fill in your key
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=mr_live_YOUR_KEY_HERE
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.monorouter.com/v1

Add .env to your .gitignore (it almost certainly already is) so keys don't get committed:

echo ".env" >> .gitignore

Step 8: Verify the Setup

Run a quick check to confirm routing is working. This one-liner hits the MonoRouter endpoint and prints the response:

# verify_monorouter.py
import anthropic

client = anthropic.Anthropic()  # reads env vars automatically

response = client.messages.create(
    model="claude-sonnet-4-20250514",
    max_tokens=50,
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Say 'MonoRouter is working' and nothing else."}],
)
print(response.content[0].text)
print(f"Model: {response.model}")
print(f"Tokens: {response.usage.input_tokens} in, {response.usage.output_tokens} out")

$ python verify_monorouter.py
MonoRouter is working
Model: claude-sonnet-4-20250514
Tokens: 18 in, 7 out

If you see output, you're routing through MonoRouter. The request will also appear in the team's audit log within seconds.

Monitoring Usage

The team page shows usage broken down by member, along with an audit log of team management actions (invites, role changes, removals). At a glance you can see:

• Per-member usage — calls in the last 30 days and how they compare to each member's monthly cap
• Per-session health — which Claude accounts are active, throttled, or disconnected
• Audit log — who invited whom, role changes, and seat changes
• Pool status — whether the pool is active (requires the owner's Team subscription to stay current)

Use this to identify when you need more capacity. If you're consistently seeing queued requests during peak hours, it's time to add another Claude account to the pool.

Scaling Up

Need more throughput? Add more Claude accounts to the pool. Each additional account increases your team's capacity linearly. There's no configuration change needed on the client side — MonoRouter detects new sessions and starts routing to them immediately.

Need more than 5 seats? The Team plan currently caps at 5 pooled seats; for larger rollouts, run multiple teams or reach out about your needs.

Cost Optimization

For most teams, a mix of Pro and Max subscriptions feeding the pool is optimal, on top of the flat $99/mo Team plan. Here's a quick comparison for a team of six:

Setup	Monthly Cost	Effective Throughput
Team plan + 6× Pro ($20)	$219	Moderate — good for normal dev work
Team plan + 3× Pro + 3× Max	$459	High — handles CI + heavy dev work
Team plan + 6× Max ($100)	$699	Maximum — sustained high-volume usage
API only (no MonoRouter)	$1,000–2,000+	Varies — scales with token consumption

Start with Pro subscriptions for everyone. If you're hitting rate limits, upgrade your heaviest users to Max before adding more Pro accounts — Max has significantly higher per-session limits.