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Every model in the catalog carries metadata — pricing, context window, max output tokens, capabilities, and modes (which decide whether it shows up as a chat, embeddings, image, or audio model). GoModel assembles it from five sources, strongest first:

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The sources

  1. Pricing overrides — set per model in the dashboard’s Models page. The top layer for pricing fields only; unset price types keep inheriting. See Cost tracking.
  2. config.yaml metadata — providers.<name>.models entries can attach metadata (pricing, context_window, modes, capabilities, …). Declared fields win field-by-field over everything below; omitted fields inherit. This is the escape hatch for local models: declaring modes: [embedding] also derives the model’s category.
  3. Provider discovery — most providers describe their models in their own listings, and what a provider says about its own deployment wins over the catalog field by field: Anthropic’s display name, token limits and capability flags; Gemini’s display name, description, token limits and thinking support (also on Vertex); Groq’s context window, output limit, modalities, features and prices; xAI’s context window, prices (with the long-context tier) and reasoning support; Fireworks’ model kind, context window and feature flags; OpenRouter’s name, description, modalities, supported parameters and prices; Cohere’s endpoints, context length and features; Bedrock’s display name, modalities and streaming support; Chutes’ context length, max output, features and prices; Ollama’s /api/show capabilities, family and context length; vLLM, SGLang and llm-d’s max_model_len; and llama.cpp’s context window and modalities (see llama.cpp). Capability names are mapped onto the catalog’s vocabulary (function_calling, vision, reasoning, …) so both layers describe one feature under one key. This matters most for self-hosted servers, where the running process is the only source that can know the real context window. Models declared via configured model lists skip this step.
  4. The model catalog — the ai-model-list registry, fetched from MODEL_LIST_URL (default: the registry’s models.min.json on GitHub) at startup and on every catalog refresh. It supplies the rich defaults — pricing, context windows, capabilities, modes — for most hosted models, matching IDs directly, through aliases, and with release-date suffixes stripped, and it fills in every field the provider above did not report. Wrong or missing data is best fixed by contributing to the registry; use an override for an immediate fix.
  5. ID heuristic — a last-resort name check for models that end up with no modes at all (typical for llama.cpp and LM Studio): IDs containing embed or matching well-known embedding families (bge, e5, gte, minilm) become embedding models, IDs containing rerank become reranking models. Namespaced IDs are matched by their final path segment. When unsure, it claims nothing.

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Checking where a value came from

Expand a row on the dashboard’s Models page to see the model’s effective metadata with the layer that supplied each field, and switch the panel to Provider, Catalog, or Config to see one layer on its own. The same data is served by GET /admin/models/metadata.

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What metadata affects

  • Pricing drives cost tracking, budgets, and cost load-balancing. Each priced field remembers its source, so the dashboard can show where a rate came from.
  • Modes and categories drive dashboard grouping only — routing never blocks on them, so /v1/embeddings reaches any model the provider serves.
  • Context window and capabilities are advertised on GET /v1/models (and on GET /v1/models/{model} for a single model) for clients that pick models dynamically.

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Offline behavior

If the catalog fetch fails or the deployment is air-gapped, the gateway runs normally — only the catalog-supplied defaults (including catalog pricing) are missing. Pricing overrides, config.yaml metadata, provider discovery signals, and the ID heuristic still apply. MODEL_LIST_URL accepts a local file as well as an HTTP URL:
A file is read on startup and on every cache refresh, and re-parsed only when its content changes, so you can update pricing by replacing the file. Because a file involves no network request, it keeps working under GOMODEL_OFFLINE=true, which drops HTTP catalog URLs. Set MODEL_LIST_URL=off to turn the catalog off entirely and declare metadata in config.yaml; see the production guide for the full air-gap checklist.
Last modified on September 23, 2026