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Set and interpret spend caps

On Business and Enterprise organization instances, spend is governed in three places: your organization contract limit, per-user limits you set for members, and optional project pools that carve out part of the company budget for a job. Individual plan users have a personal balance instead — see Individual billing and usage.

Your organization limit comes from your contract — trial, pilot, or subscription — not from a setting in the app. It covers the included usage for the current billing period. Admins see it on Admin → Usage as "Organization included usage", with the period dates and the next reset.

Per-user limits are the ones you configure. They cap what a single member can spend, either over the whole contract or over a weekly or monthly window that you choose. Configure them on Admin → Members.

Project pools move a slice of the company budget onto a project so that project's AI work draws from its own allocation. Configure them on Admin → Budgets.

The most restrictive limit wins: a member can never exceed their per-user limit, a project cannot spend past its pool (unless you allow company leftover), and the organization can never exceed its contract allocation.

Turn on per-user limits​

  1. Open Admin → Members.
  2. Switch on Spend limits, set a default per-user limit, and choose how often it resets.
  3. Override the limit for specific people from their row in the members table, where current spend and limit status are also shown.

You pick one reset schedule, and it applies to everyone. Each person can have a different dollar limit, but all limits go back to full on the same schedule. Choose Every month or Every week and each member's limit starts over at the beginning of that month or week (in UTC, with weeks starting on Monday). Unused budget does not carry over. Choose Never and the limit is one total for the whole contract, so a member who uses it up stays blocked until the contract renews. The column headers in the members table show which schedule is active, such as "Org usage this month" and "Monthly cap". You can change the schedule any time from the pencil beside the default.

Fund a project pool​

Until project budget management is on, all AI spend draws from the company pool. Use project pools when you want job- or team-level budgets instead of one shared pot.

  1. Open Admin → Budgets (page title AI Usage Budgets).
  2. Under Project Pools, choose Enable project budget management.
  3. Select a project in the list.
  4. Choose Add money to move credit from the company pool. Pick Just once, Every week, or Every month.
  5. Choose what happens when the project pool is empty:
    • Keep this project on its own budget — members cannot spend more until an admin adds money.
    • Let this project use leftover company budget — when the project pool is empty, spend can draw from the organization budget again, as long as that person has not already hit their personal spend limit or the organization limit.
  6. Use Reclaim money to move unused project budget back to the company pool when the job is done or the allocation is too high.

Funding a project moves credit out of the company pool — it is not extra budget on top of the organization grant. Admin → Budgets shows how much is still left in the company pool to fund projects.

Project-level member limits​

After a project has a pool, project admins can set spend limits for people on that project:

  1. Open the project → Project Settings → Members.
  2. Switch on Spend limits.
  3. Set a default limit and optional per-member overrides.

Next to the default amount, choose how often each member's limit resets: Daily, Weekly, or Monthly (in UTC, with weeks starting on Monday), or No period for one total that never resets.

Members and project admins can check granted, spent, and remaining project budget on Project Settings → Usage. Organization admins can still review project spend from Admin → Analytics → Projects.

What happens as a limit is approached​

  • 75% of a per-user limit: the member sees a warning in the composer, with further warnings at 90% and 95%.
  • 80% of the organization contract limit: admins see a banner. Admins are also warned when the contract is within three days of expiring, or when a period has no allocation.
  • 100%: new AI work is blocked. The member sees a block message. Indexing a member starts (uploads, Index Document, Index Folder) counts toward their per-user limit and is blocked too. Parsing that Nomic runs without a requesting user is not attributed to anyone and is not subject to per-user limits.
  • In-flight runs continue. The limit is checked before work starts, not during, so a run already underway finishes rather than producing partial results. Actual spend can land slightly above the limit when a large run was in progress.

Request a higher spend limit​

Members who are approaching or over their limit open Settings → Usage and use Request increase. They can edit or withdraw a pending request while it is open; their limit does not change until an admin acts.

Requests land in Admin → Requests, where admins can approve or deny them individually or approve all pending spend-increase requests at once. Approving raises that member's limit to the requested amount. When a project pool is empty, members may also ask admins to move more company budget into that project — those top-up requests appear for admins on Admin → Budgets.

If you need a hard stop mid-run, cancel it from the run's page; spend stops accruing within a few seconds.

Practical tips​

  • Set per-user limits that match the work — someone running drawing reviews needs a higher cap than an occasional user.
  • Put delivery work in projects with funded pools when teams need job-level visibility; leave exploratory work on the company pool until you know the pattern.
  • A weekly or monthly reset caps the damage from one runaway week without an admin having to intervene, and it costs less attention than approving increases against a contract-long cap. A contract-long cap suits pilots where the total matters more than the pace.
  • Use Admin → Analytics → Workflows to check whether one expensive workflow is driving most of the spend before you change limits.
  • If several people hit their limit quickly, check whether they are indexing large files or running broad workflows before raising anything.
  • For very large drawing packages, run representative batches (for example about 100–200 pages at a time) before committing the full set — see Estimate before a large run.

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