AI Cost Limits
Overview
Control your organization's AI spending by setting cost limits in USD. When a limit is reached, new AI executions (threads, voice, code completion, AI-powered tools) are blocked until the window resets or an administrator raises the limit.
Limits are configured by organization administrators in Organization → AI → Limits. Amounts accept cents (for example, 12.50). All limits default to no limit; leave a field empty to remove one.
Available limits
| Limit | Scope | Window |
|---|---|---|
| Daily limit per user | Each user's AI cost | Calendar day, resets at midnight UTC |
| Weekly limit per user | Each user's AI cost | ISO calendar week, resets Monday at 00:00 UTC |
| Monthly limit per user | Each user's AI cost | Calendar month (UTC) |
| Organization monthly limit | Total AI cost of the whole organization | Calendar month (UTC) |
Nothing gets past it: no user limit, no group limit and no extra usage. It is also a single budget shared by everyone — whoever spends it leaves less for the rest. Limits above it are rejected when you save them, so what is stored is always what applies.
Per-response token limit
Besides the cost windows above, every single AI response (an agentic "run") has a token ceiling: the total tokens (input + output) one response may consume across all its internal model requests. The pricing plan defines the ceiling; organization administrators can lower it in the same Cost limits form (never raise it above the plan). When a response hits the limit it stops with a controlled error — partial work (tool calls already executed) is preserved.
This is a safety net against runaway loops, not a day-to-day tuning knob: legitimate responses stay far below the default ceiling.
Limits per user and group
The limits above apply to everyone equally. To set a different budget for specific people, use Organization → AI → Limits, split into five tabs: General (the limits above), Users, Groups, Projects and Extra usage. Each table has its own search box, and the whole section is visible to organization administrators only.
Each subject has its own daily, weekly and monthly limit, which replaces the organization one for them — to give more room or to give less. An empty field means None: that period falls back to the limits above.
- Users — one column per period showing what the user spent against the limit enforced on them, plus an Extra usage wallet column reading the same way: spent against granted, with the balance left. The row's "..." menu has Edit limits, Grant extra usage and Remove own limits, which clears every period at once.
- Groups — the limit of each period and how many members it reaches. Group limits apply to every one of them. Groups have no spend of their own.
Reading a period cell:
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
12,00 $ / 40,00 with a progress bar | Spent against the limit enforced. The bar turns orange at 80% and red at 100%, the same thresholds that warn and block. |
| The limit is the organization's monthly ceiling | Nobody set a monthly limit, so what actually stops the subject is the ceiling — a single budget shared by the whole organization. It only replaces the monthly cell: on a day or a week it is listed in the explanation as the shared monthly budget it is, never as that period's limit. |
| No limit | Nothing bounds that period at all: no limit of their own, no organization limit, no plan ceiling. |
| A dotted underline | The amount has an explanation. Hovering opens How this limit is calculated: every subject that could set the period's limit — including the ones that set nothing — the winner marked with a check, the extra usage wallet (spent, granted and balance), the organization ceiling, and the projects that also cap the period in parallel. |
The organization ceiling is shared. If one person spends it all, everyone else is blocked. Per-user limits are what keep one person from draining the whole budget.
How a limit is resolved
For each period, the most specific subject that sets a limit wins:
- the user's own limit, if they have one for that period;
- otherwise the highest among the groups they belong to;
- otherwise the organization's per-user limit.
A limit left at None takes no part, so a subject can set one period and leave the others alone. Periods resolve independently: a user can take their weekly limit from a group and their monthly limit from their own.
Groups fall back to the highest because there is no way to tell which of two groups is more specific.
The organization monthly limit and the pricing plan's ceiling bound everything: a user or group limit above them is rejected on save, and the extra usage wallet never pushes anyone past them.
A user's own limit wins even when it is lower than their group's or the organization's. That is how you restrict one person without touching anybody else.
The period cell shows the resolved amount with a tag naming where it came from (individual or the group's name; no tag means the organization limit) — so it is always clear why a user has the budget they have. Extra usage is shown apart, as the wallet it is.
Limits per project
A project limit answers a different question from the ones above. Those ask how much may this person spend; a project limit asks how much may this project spend in total, whoever spends it.
It is therefore not resolved against the user, group or organization limits: it applies in parallel, and a run is blocked as soon as either budget runs out — the person's or the project's.
- Set them in the Projects tab, which also shows what the project has spent in each period.
- A project has the same three periods as everybody else — daily, weekly and monthly — with the same daily ≤ weekly ≤ monthly rule. The daily one is the cheapest guard against a runaway loop.
- Like every other limit, none of them can exceed the organization's monthly ceiling.
- An empty period means the project is bounded only by the organization limits for it.
| Bounds | Resolved against others? | |
|---|---|---|
| User / group limits | What one person may spend | Yes — the most specific wins |
| Project limits | What the whole project may spend | No — apply in parallel |
| Organization monthly limit | What everyone may spend together | No — it is the ceiling for all of them |
Extra usage
Extra usage is a wallet, not a wider limit. It gives one user something to keep going with once they reach a limit, and it is spent once. Use it when someone needs more room for a specific piece of work.
- Top it up from the Grant extra usage action on a user's row, or with the + button on the Extra usage tab, which asks for the user and the amount. Either way the dialog shows what that user has spent and what is left before you add to it.
- It has no period. Whichever limit runs out first — daily, weekly or monthly — the spend that no longer fits is charged to the wallet, and what is left stays there until it is used or removed.
- Because it is charged and not added, a wallet is spent once. It is not handed out again the next day or the next week, which is what a limit widened by the same amount would do.
- Payments add up: the amount you enter is added to whatever the wallet already holds.
- To take budget back, revoke the entry in the Extra usage tab. It takes back what is left of that grant, not its full amount: spent money is spent, so revoking a grant the user already used up gives back little or nothing, and the row says exactly how much was recovered. The entry stays, marked as revoked with who did it and when — nothing is ever deleted from the ledger, or there would be no way to tell "nobody granted this" from "somebody granted it and took it back".
- The Extra usage tab is the ledger of those payments, newest first: who was paid in, how much, by whom, when and whether it was revoked. Every row also shows that user's whole wallet — spent against granted — because the amount of one entry says nothing about what is left.
- Only users get a wallet — groups and projects set limits and nothing else — and it never lets the organization exceed its monthly limit or the plan ceiling. A project cap is not opened by it either.
A wallet tied to the calendar month was worth what the day of the grant decided: given on the 30th it lived one day, given on the 1st it lived a month. An unspent balance also disappeared for no reason the admin could act on. The limits are what bound spending per period; the wallet is money, and money does not need a period.
Requesting more usage
When a user reaches a per-user limit, they can ask for more without leaving the app. A Request more action appears both in the blocked message in the thread composer and in the sidebar limits popover, with a free-text field for the reason.
- Submitting it emails every administrator of the organization — the same email as event notifications — with the requester, their reason, and a direct link to the Extra usage section of the admin panel.
- The request is recorded in Activity → Events, so who asked, what and when stays auditable.
- A user can send one request per organization and day; a second one is refused until the next day.
- There is no approval flow: the admin resolves it by granting the wallet by hand, exactly as above. The user does not state an amount — they explain it in the reason if they want.
How enforcement works
- All configured limits are checked together on every AI execution; the first one reached blocks it.
- Per-user limits are checked against the effective limit — the resolved one — measured on the spend the wallet has not already paid for. A user whose limit is spent keeps running while their wallet has a balance, and is blocked as soon as it is empty.
- When any limit reaches 80% of its quota, a warning notification is sent (visible in Activity → Events, and by email if you have notification rules configured).
- At 100%, new AI executions are blocked. The user sees a message explaining which limit was reached and when it resets, and — for per-user limits — a Request more action to ask the administrators for extra usage. When the limit reached is a project cap, the message says so: upgrading the plan does not lift it, only an organization administrator raising the project's limit does.
- The window resets automatically (midnight UTC for daily limits, Monday for weekly limits, the first day of the month for monthly ones), or an administrator can raise the limit at any time.
Per-user limits apply to each individual consumer of AI in the organization's projects, including non-members using shared resources. Anonymous visitors (for example, viewers of a shared thread) are not subject to per-user limits — only the organization-wide limit applies to them.
Validation rules
- The organization monthly limit cannot exceed your pricing plan's monthly AI cost limit when the plan defines one — the plan is always the ceiling. Equal is allowed: you may set the organization limit to the full plan limit.
- The daily limit per user cannot exceed the weekly or monthly limits per user.
- The weekly limit per user cannot exceed the monthly limit per user.
- Per-user limits cannot exceed the organization's effective monthly ceiling (the organization monthly limit or the plan limit, whichever is lower). Equal is allowed: a single user may consume the whole budget.
- Limits must be greater than zero.
- The same daily ≤ weekly ≤ monthly rule applies to each subject's own limits, including the ones they inherit: a daily limit of $50 is rejected for a user whose monthly limit is $10, because the month would block them first and the daily budget could never be reached.
Monitoring consumption
Current AI consumption per user and for the whole organization is available in Organization → Activity → AI Usage, including cost in USD, token counts, and monthly trends. You can filter it by project, provider, model, or user.
Project administrators can also review consumption scoped to a single project in Project → Activity → Consumption.
Your personal view
Every user can track their own AI spending in User profile → AI, in two tabs:
- Limits — one card per organization you belong to, showing how much you have used and how much is left today, this week and this month against your effective limits — your own or your groups' — plus, if you are an organization administrator, the organization's monthly total and, when you have one, what is left in your extra usage wallet. A colored progress bar warns you as you approach each limit.
- Consumption — your detailed usage across all your organizations and projects, with totals, a monthly trend, and a per-project breakdown. Filter by organization, project, provider, model, or period.
Inside a project, a compact progress bar next to Threads in the sidebar shows how much of your AI budget you have used in that project's organization. It picks the tightest window you have a limit for — today, else this week, else this month — and fills up completely in red as soon as any window is spent. When you have no limit at all, the bar stays empty. Hover it for a breakdown by today, this week and this month plus your extra usage wallet, and a View AI consumption link to the full User profile → AI view. When the sidebar is collapsed, the same bar appears as a Consumption row at the top of the Threads flyout.
When you have reached a limit, a compact warning appears in that sidebar popover and on the matching organization card in the Limits tab, naming which limit was hit and when it resets — the same notice you see in the thread composer.
Set per-user limits slightly below what your monthly organization budget allows per head — the 80% warning gives users time to react before they are blocked.