I’ve been tinkering with LiteLLM at home, and pairing it with my OpenWebUI setup has unlocked something surprisingly practical: real budgets I can enforce automatically so there are no surprise bills. LiteLLM gives me one endpoint for many providers, per-key rate limits that fit each person in my household, and a clean way to bring local models into the same flow. In this post I break down how it works, why it matters for home-brew projects or small teams, and how to deploy it with Docker, end to end. I’ll also show simple recipes for monthly caps, per-key tokens-per-minute or requests-per-minute, and routing that prefers cheap or local models first.