Set a ceiling on how many credits your workforce can spend per hour, day, week, or month, so a runaway task or a busy day never turns into a surprise bill.
Spending Limit puts a hard ceiling on how many credits your workforce can burn in an hour, day, week, or month, whichever cadence matches how you think about cost. Set it once and every employee's spend counts against the same shared cap, so one runaway task or one unexpectedly busy day can't turn into a bill you didn't see coming.
Work that's already running is never interrupted mid-task when a limit is hit, only new spend beyond the cap is held back. Need more room right now, one click releases an extra period's allowance without raising the limit permanently, so a genuinely busy day doesn't require you to renegotiate your own settings.
Leave the amount blank and we pick one for you: a default that spreads your plan's monthly credit allowance, plus any bonus credits you've been granted, evenly across the period you chose, then doubles that pace so ordinary work never brushes against it. A monthly limit skips the doubling and simply mirrors your plan's own pool, since a cap above the pool itself would mean nothing. Plans with no fixed monthly allowance, the Free plan, which runs on a lifetime cap instead, and unlimited or Enterprise plans, have nothing to derive a pace from, so the field stays open rather than guessing at a number.
It's off by default, so it never surprises a new workspace with a cap it didn't ask for, and it changes nothing about your plan or your credit balance, it only decides how fast that balance is allowed to move.
This matters more with an AI workforce than with any single tool, because a whole team of AI employees can work in parallel: several running at once means several spending at once, and a pace control is the only thing standing between that parallelism and a bill you didn't plan for.
Spending Limit doesn't touch your plan, your credit balance, or what any individual employee is allowed to do. It's purely a pace control: how many credits can move through the workspace in a given hour, day, week, or month, no matter which employee or task is spending them.
That makes it useful in opposite situations. Turn it on tight while you're testing a new workflow and don't want a mistake to run away with your balance. Turn it off entirely once you trust the workspace's normal spend pattern.
Work already in flight always finishes, a task doesn't get cut off mid-sentence because the clock ran out. New work that would push spend past the cap waits until the next period starts, or until you release extra room with one click. Budget activity records each actual pause with the limit, usage, and remaining plan credits at that moment, while its local check is completely free.
The cap applies across the whole workspace, every AI employee's spend counts against the same shared number. That's the point: as you hire more employees and more of them run in parallel, Spending Limit is what keeps total spend predictable without you having to set a limit per employee individually.
Spending Limit lives on the same Rate Limits page as several other numbers it's easy to confuse it with: how many employees you can have hired at once, how many actions an employee can take in one turn, how many teammates can work at the same time, how deep a delegation chain can go, and how long a delegated teammate is allowed to run. Two more, model calls per turn and time per turn, are fixed walls against a runaway loop rather than settings you choose.
None of those move when you change your spending limit, and your spending limit doesn't move when you change them. Each is its own control, shown on its own row, with its own link back to wherever it's actually enforced. Spending Limit paces credits; the rest bound behavior within a single turn or delegation.
A pre-execution check against a calendar-aligned window, not a mid-task kill switch
You choose an amount and a period. The smallest amount you can set is 100 credits, a floor that exists so a mistyped number cannot lock you out of a plan you already paid for; there is no way to set it to zero, only to switch it off. Periods are calendar-aligned in UTC rather than rolling, so a daily limit always resets at midnight UTC, a weekly one on Monday, and a monthly one on the 1st. The current window's end time is always shown, so you know exactly when the pause lifts.
Every time an employee is about to start a new turn, the system checks total spend so far in the current window against your limit. Under the limit, the turn proceeds normally. At or over it, new work is held rather than started, and the employee tells you in chat with a link back to the Rate Limits page, alongside a notification and an email carrying the same link. You hear about a warning at 80% of the window and about the pause itself once each, so a heavy day does not turn into a stream of repeated alerts.
If work genuinely cannot wait, there are three ways through it from the same page: release the current period's extra allowance, which doubles the limit for that window only and reverts by itself once the window ends; raise the number outright, which takes effect immediately; or switch the limit off entirely, leaving only your plan's credit allowance in force. None of these grant extra credits, they only change how fast you are allowed to spend the ones you already have.
Because this brake sits inside a plan you already paid for, it fails open: if the system cannot resolve a limit for any reason, no cap is applied rather than blocking your team by accident. The plan's own monthly or lifetime credit pool is the layer that actually protects your bill, and that layer stays strict regardless of anything on this page.
An employee working through a schedule or a long delegated task can spend faster than a human would notice. Setting a daily or hourly limit means the worst case is a paused workforce and a notification, never a surprise bill at the end of the month.
Before kicking off a large batch task, check how long your current number would last against it, and raise the limit or release the current period's extra allowance if the job genuinely needs to run faster than your normal pace.
The spending limit sits next to every other limit your workforce runs against, plan credits, employee headcount, per-turn controls, so you can see in one place whether a specific number needs raising or whether the team is simply within its pace.
If a limit set too tight pauses the team mid-project, the same page that paused you offers the fix: release this period's extra allowance for an immediate, self-reverting boost, or raise the number outright and carry on.
No. In-flight work always finishes. The limit only holds back new spend beyond the cap.
One click releases an extra period's allowance without permanently raising the limit.
No, it's off by default. You turn it on and choose the cap and cadence yourself.
Across the whole workspace. Every employee's spend counts against the same shared cap.
Roughly double your plan's steady pace for the period you chose, spread from your plan's monthly credit allowance plus any bonus credits. A monthly limit skips the doubling and matches your plan's pool exactly.
No. It paces spend inside the plan and credits you already have. It doesn't change your bill or your credit balance.
A number you left blank recalculates for the new plan automatically. A number you typed yourself stays exactly as you set it.
Spending Limit is part of How you see what they did.
A real-time activity feed shows who is working on what right now. The step-by-step inspector traces every tool call, decision, and reasoning chain. Cost tracking breaks down spend per message, per employee, and per team. Walk through your live 3D office to see your workforce at a glance.