Budgets & limits

How budgets are structured

Budgets in your exocorp are scoped — they apply to specific things, not to the whole company indiscriminately. You’ll have:

• A top-level company budget — The envelope for the whole exocorp. Almost always sums from below.
• Per-team budgets — Each team has its own budget scope. A team can’t spend outside its allocation; if it needs more, it surfaces an approval to you.
• Per-plugin or per-integration budgets — For integrations that have their own spend (e.g. a provider that bills separately), budgets can be scoped to them.
• Custom scopes — You can set budgets on arbitrary scopes — a specific bet, a particular customer engagement, a campaign — if you want hard limits on something that doesn’t map cleanly to a team.

Setting and changing budgets

You configure budgets in the operator portal’s Settings — the Budgets subpage. For each scope, you set:

• The limit — Total dollars (or other unit) over a period. Usually a monthly cap.
• Advisory threshold — The level at which the company should start watching. Usually 60-70%. Crossing it triggers a soft signal in the Overview and the Inbox.
• Soft limit — The point at which the company stops admitting new non-essential work in this scope. Usually 85-90%. Existing work continues; new initiatives wait. An alert shows up in the Inbox.
• Hard stop — The level at which the scope refuses to admit any new work, including continuing in-flight efforts that require new spend. The scope is effectively paused. An urgent alert hits the Inbox.

You can change limits at any time. Lowering a limit below current spend immediately moves the scope into the appropriate alert state.

Watching spending

Budget pressure surfaces in several places:

• Overview — Top-level pressure bar plus the three most-stressed sub-budgets. Daily glance.
• Team detail pages — Per-team budget detail: used, limit, burn rate per day, projected month-end. With overrun callout if the projection puts the team past its limit.
• Inbox — Active budget alerts — advisory, soft limit, hard stop — with percent-used bars and links to the relevant scope’s settings.
• Settings → Budgets — All scopes in one place. Useful for spotting structural issues (one team way under, one way over) and rebalancing.

Handling alerts

When a budget alert hits the Inbox, your options:

• Raise the limit — If the spend is justified, increase the budget. The alert clears, the scope continues operating.
• Look at what's spending — Drill into the team’s detail page to see which work items, which agents, which categories are consuming. Sometimes one specific thing is the cost.
• Pause the scope — If the work isn’t justified, pause the team or scope. Existing in-flight work may complete; new work stops admitting.
• Reshape — If a team keeps blowing through budget, the underlying issue is usually structural. The mandate may be too broad. Tools may be too expensive. The team may need different capabilities. See Working with teams.

What drives the spend

The dominant cost components in most exocorps:

• Provider tokens — Each model invocation costs. High-capability agents running on premium models will dominate spend. The audit trail and the per-team detail show this.
• Plugin costs — Plugins that talk to paid third-party APIs (CRM, email sending, SMS, search) incur their own cost. Surfaced through the plugin’s settings.
• Runtime cost — The compute the exocorp itself runs on. Smaller and more predictable than the above, but real.