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Set and interpret spend caps

Spend caps prevent surprise bills. You set them once and Nomic enforces them in the background; users and admins see warnings as caps approach.

Cap levels​

You can set caps at three levels:

  1. Organization — the total your tenant can spend per billing period.
  2. Per-user — the limit a single user can drive in a period.
  3. Trial / pilot — a one-time ceiling Nomic and your account contact agree on at the start of a pilot.

Caps are additive in the sense that the most restrictive one wins: a user can never exceed their per-user cap, and the whole org can never exceed the org cap.

Set caps​

  1. Open Admin → Billing → Spend caps.
  2. Set the org-level cap and (optionally) a default per-user cap.
  3. Override per-user caps for specific people if a few power users need more headroom.

Caps reset on the billing-period boundary.

What happens when a cap is hit​

  • At ~80% of cap: admins and the affected user get a warning.
  • At 100%: new runs are blocked until the cap is raised or the period resets.
  • In-flight runs continue. A workflow already running will finish — Nomic doesn't kill in-progress work to avoid partial / wasted results. This means actual spend can land slightly above the cap if a large run was already underway when the cap was reached.

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

Interpret caps in reports​

  • "Spend this period" is what's posted so far in the current billing window.
  • "Reserved spend" is the headroom blocked by in-flight runs. When a run completes, reserved spend moves into posted spend.
  • "Available" is cap - posted - reserved.

Practical tips​

  • Start trials with a conservative org cap; raise it once usage patterns are clear.
  • Set per-user caps that match the work — power users running drawing reviews need more headroom than occasional users.
  • Use Admin → Analytics → Workflows to identify whether a single expensive workflow is driving most of the spend before you change caps.
  • If several users hit caps quickly, check whether they are indexing large files or running broad workflows before raising the limits.