Costs and budgets

Grounded meters every model call in its usage ledger. With prices entered, it reports what that use costs, and it can hold each team to a monthly budget. Cost tracking is off by default: nothing changes for anyone until you choose a mode. Everything is under Usage & spend → Costs (Overview · Budgets · Prices · Settings). Platform admins change it; auditors can read it.

1. Enter pricesCopy Anchor Link

Prices can be entered while the mode is still Off, so tracking starts with correct figures.

1. Costs → Prices lists every chat, embedding, SystemOne and moderation model with its price today. A missing price shows Unpriced.
2. Open a model, then Change prices in its Pricing section.
3. Choose Effective from (a day in the platform time zone) and fill in the units you're changing. Units left empty keep their price.

• Prices are dated, never edited. A change adds rows. Each day's usage is priced at the row in effect that day, so past spend doesn't change when a price does.
• Pricing past usage: choose a date in the past. Usage already recorded from that day is priced at once.
• A mistake: delete the row. Usage on its days goes back to the row before it, or to unpriced.
• Unpriced usage costs nothing and is flagged in every report, so a missing price is visible rather than silently free.

The currency is a display code only; there's no conversion. Tesseract and Tika OCR pages are counted but not priced.

2. Choose a modeCopy Anchor Link

Costs → Settings:

A team's own mode overrides the platform's: Inherit, Off, Track only or Enforce, on its admin page's Overview → Budget card, or Change budget… on Costs → Budgets. A common rollout:

1. Enter prices and set the platform to Track only for a month. Compare the Overview with your gateway's bill.
2. Give a pilot team a budget and Enforce.
3. Set the platform to Enforce with a default budget, and give larger teams their own.

3. Reading spendCopy Anchor Link

• Overview: total spend over a date range, a daily chart by kind (chat, embedding, SystemOne, moderation, OCR) with the day table behind Show data, and Top spenders by Teams, Agents or Models. One CSV button downloads the grouping shown, every row.
• Budgets: every active team's mode, budget (plus this month's extensions), month-to-date spend, share and projected month-end.

• Teams see their own spend: owners and admins in Usage & spend, on the team Overview, and on each agent's Analytics tab. Editors and members see no money.

Figures come from an hourly rollup of the ledger, plus the latest hour read live. Usage outside agents (direct searches, ingestion) is listed as "Not from an agent".

4. At the threshold and at 100%Copy Anchor Link

• Track only: nothing below happens.
• At the threshold: the team's owners and admins are notified once a month (in the app and by email; it can't be turned off). Everyone in the team sees a banner; only owners and admins see amounts.
• At 100% (Enforce): everything that calls a model stops for the team. Chats in every channel and knowledge base searches are refused (429 budget_exhausted); anonymous visitors of public agents see only "This assistant is unavailable right now". New ingestion waits and crawls pause. Nothing is deleted or failed, and the team appears under Needs attention.
• At the start of the next month, in the platform time zone, everything continues by itself.

5. A team whose budget is used upCopy Anchor Link

Check its spend and projection on Costs → Budgets or its Budget card; the Overview, filtered to the month, shows which agents and models used it. Then:

• Grant extension: an amount for this month only, with a reason. It lapses when the month ends.
• Change budget: for this and later months.
• Do nothing: the team resumes next month.

Either change takes effect at once: waiting documents are queued, paused crawls continue and chats are admitted again.

LimitationsCopy Anchor Link

• Budgets are checked against a figure cached for up to 30 seconds per server, so a busy team can go over its budget by about that much use. Documents already being ingested when a budget runs out finish; only pending ones wait.
• Re-embedding during a profile migration isn't checked against budgets.
• Usage that retention had purged before costs existed (v0.2.0) is kept per UTC day, so budget months before then are exact only to the day.
• There are no per-agent budgets.

TroubleshootingCopy Anchor Link