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DVARA 1.11 and 1.12 — The Cost Advisor, current Anthropic SDKs, and token counts that match the bill

· 5 min read
DVARA Team
DVARA Team

A gateway sees every model call, so it knows where the money goes. Until now DVARA used that to enforce budgets and to show spend. It did not tell you how to spend less.

DVARA 1.12.0 does. The new Cost Advisor reads your last 30 days of calls and lists ways to spend less, each with what it saves a month. It also checks a cheaper model on your own traffic before it calls the switch safe. This post covers 1.11.0 too, which shipped the day before.

Ways to spend less, priced from your own traffic​

Cost → Cost Advisor in Flightdeck shows four kinds of suggestion:

  • Use a cheaper model. When a workspace spends at least $50 a month on a model, the advisor looks for a model from the same provider that can do the same things: tools, structured output, reasoning, images and enough context. It picks the closest step down that costs at most 70% as much, not the cheapest one.
  • Turn on the response cache. If the cache is off and some requests repeat one it would have answered, the advisor shows what those calls cost. One click turns the cache on.
  • Route by tier. For a model whose traffic is often simple, it prices what routing by complexity would save, using a tier map you already have.
  • Large system prompts. It flags an API key that sends a prompt of 2,000 tokens or more on every call, and what prompt caching would save. DVARA never changes a prompt.

Every figure is priced the way your bill is: on the tokens each call used, at your prices. A suggestion under $5 a month is not shown. Each one can be dismissed with a reason, and comes back only if its saving doubles. Every apply and dismissal goes on the audit trail. See Cost Advisor.

A cheaper model is checked before it is called safe​

A cheaper model only saves money if its answers are as good. So a workspace admin can let DVARA check it on the workspace's own requests.

After an answer has gone back to your application, the Gateway sends a small sample of requests (2%, at most 200 a day per Gateway) to the cheaper model. The request goes through the same policies, PII rules and guardrails as any other. A judge model then compares the two answers. Only the verdict is kept: no text of the request or either answer is stored.

After 30 checks, the suggestion shows Validated when quality held in at least 90% of them. Otherwise it shows Quality dropped, and DVARA stops trying that model. The checks are billed to the workspace, up to $10 a month unless you set another limit, and they never change an answer. It is off until the admin turns it on. See Check cheaper models on your traffic.

The current Anthropic SDKs work​

Anthropic's new API version, 2026-10-21, is what its current SDKs send: Java 3, Python 2, TypeScript 1, Go 2, C# 13, PHP 1, Ruby 2 and the ant CLI 2. Up to 1.11, DVARA's /v1/messages accepted only 2023-06-01, so a client that upgraded its SDK was refused.

1.12.0 serves both. Under 2026-10-21, DVARA refuses what that version removed, the same way Anthropic does: temperature, top_p and top_k, a document in an assistant message, and citations on a user's text. Clients on 2023-06-01, including Claude Code, work as before. See Use the Anthropic Messages API.

DVARA's own calls to Anthropic move to 2026-10-21 as well. When DVARA translates a request for Anthropic, for example one that came in on /v1/chat/completions, it now leaves out temperature and top_p, and the X-Gateway-Params-Not-Applied response header says so. To keep the old version, set ANTHROPIC_API_VERSION=2023-06-01 on the Gateway.

Token counts that match the bill​

DVARA counts tokens itself, for rate limits and for checking a call's cost before it is sent. In 1.11.0 we measured what Mistral bills. The text count was already exact. Mistral adds 8 tokens to every request, and 28 more when it has tools. DVARA now adds the same. You can set your own figure per model family. See Counting tokens.

Smaller fixes​

  • A streamed answer from Cohere failed on its first event. It works now.
  • The Python MCP SDK 2.3.0 works with DVARA on MCP's stateless revision, 2026-07-28, as a client and as a server behind the Gateway.
  • Two quick edits to the tier catalogue both take effect. Before, the second could be missed until the file changed again.
  • A Gateway that joins the cluster late now learns the agent sessions that were killed before it joined.

Read this before upgrading​

Nothing you set before stops working. Four things to know:

  1. Clients on the current Anthropic SDKs now reach /v1/messages. Under 2026-10-21, leave out temperature, top_p and top_k.
  2. DVARA calls Anthropic on 2026-10-21, so a translated request no longer sends temperature or top_p. ANTHROPIC_API_VERSION=2023-06-01 keeps the old behaviour.
  3. Mistral counts are 8 tokens higher per request, 28 more with tools, as Mistral bills them.
  4. Flightdeck adds one table for the Cost Advisor when it starts. Back up the database first.

The upgrade guide has every change.

Try DVARA 1.12​

The images ghcr.io/dvarahq/dvara-gateway:1.12.0 and ghcr.io/dvarahq/dvara-flightdeck:1.12.0 and the Helm chart 1.12.0 are out now. DVARA Open Source 1.12.0 is out too: get the release, follow the Open Source quickstart, or book a walkthrough of the Enterprise platform.