---
title: "Guides"
description: "Get the most out of pirouter feature by feature: routing and fallbacks, timeouts, images, data policy, the edge network, billing, usage and logs."
canonical: "https://pirouter.ai/docs/guides"
last-updated: "2026-10-17"
lang: "en"
source: "content/docs/en/guides/index.mdx"
---

# Guides

Get the most out of pirouter feature by feature: routing and fallbacks, timeouts, images, data policy, the edge network, billing, usage and logs.

By default each request is spread across the providers that serve its model by weight, and fails over to the next provider when one fails. These guides cover how to change those defaults and where to see the results in the console.

## Routing & availability

- [Provider routing](https://pirouter.ai/docs/guides/routing.md): How a provider is picked, and how to set an order, exclude providers or sort by price.
- [Model fallbacks](https://pirouter.ai/docs/guides/fallbacks.md): Which model takes over when yours is unavailable, and which one you pay for.
- [Timeouts and long requests](https://pirouter.ai/docs/guides/timeouts.md): How long the gateway waits for a provider, and how to keep long requests alive.

## Capabilities

- [Generate and edit images](https://pirouter.ai/docs/guides/images.md): Generate an image from a prompt, or upload images for a model to edit.

## Data & network

- [Data policy & ZDR](https://pirouter.ai/docs/guides/data-policy.md): What metadata is recorded, and how to use zero data retention providers only.
- [Edge network](https://pirouter.ai/docs/guides/edge-network.md): Requests enter at the nearest edge node and go straight to the provider.

## Account & console

- [Pricing & billing](https://pirouter.ai/docs/guides/billing.md): How the prepaid wallet is charged, how to top up, and what happens when it runs low.
- [Usage analytics](https://pirouter.ai/docs/guides/usage.md): Tokens, spend and requests totaled by time, model and API key.
- [Request logs](https://pirouter.ai/docs/guides/logs.md): Every request one by one; find a failure by its trace ID.