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What are Cost Policies?

Cost policies set spending limits for AI usage across your organization. Define a monthly budget for all users, or different budgets per team via user groups, to prevent unexpected costs and allocate resources fairly. Dashboard: Policies → Usage (gateway.getunbound.ai/policies/cost-policies)

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Cost Controls

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Monthly Budgets

Each cost policy sets a monthly spending limit in USD. The limit applies to each user the policy covers and tracks the calendar month, resetting when a new month starts.
  • Monthly Budget — Maximum spend per user per calendar month
  • On budget exhaustion — Once a user’s monthly budget is exhausted, their further AI requests are blocked until the month rolls over or an admin raises the budget.
  • What a budget blocks — Budget blocking covers Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Codex. Cursor is not covered by the monthly budget, but is covered by spend limits below. Copilot and Augment Code usage is recorded and counts toward your reporting, but is not blocked at either gate today.
  • Priority — Lower number wins. When several cost policies cover the same user, exactly one of them applies.

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Spend Limits

Alongside the calendar-month budget, a spend limit caps what one person can spend over a rolling window — any period up to 30 days, not tied to the month boundary.
  • A warning fires at 80% of the cap by default; set Alert Threshold (1–100%) on the policy to change it. The request still goes through, and the developer sees the warning in their coding tool.
  • At 100% the request is blocked, and the message names when the window resets.
  • The window length and the amount are set together — the policy will not save with one and not the other.
Both the monthly budget and the spend limit are hard blocks rather than warnings: once crossed, requests are refused until the window rolls over or an admin raises the limit. Every crossing — warning and block — is recorded for your admins to review, and admins can customise the message shown when the monthly budget blocks a request. The spend-limit warning and block messages are fixed; they name the policy and when the window resets.

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One budget per developer

Cost policies do not combine. When a developer is reached by more than one — an org-wide default and a team budget, or two teams they belong to — one policy wins and the others are ignored entirely. The winner is the one with the lowest priority number, and ties are broken by which policy was created first.
  • The budgets are not added together. Two $1,000 policies give that developer $1,000, not $2,000.
  • The stricter one does not automatically win. If the $5,000 policy has the lower priority number, that is the budget in force, even though a $500 policy also covers them.
So if a developer needs a tighter budget than the org default, give the tighter policy the lower priority number. You can see which policy actually reaches a developer on their panel under Users, or with unbound policy effective <user-id>.

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Usage Monitoring

Track costs in real-time from the Unbound dashboard:
  • Per-user breakdown — See which team members consume the most resources
  • Per-model costs — Understand spending across different LLM providers
  • Trend analysis — Identify usage patterns and optimize accordingly
  • Export — Admins and Analytics Viewers can export the tables on the Analytics tabs as CSV

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Setting Up Cost Policies

  1. Go to Policies → Usage in the Unbound dashboard
  2. Set the monthly budget and choose which user groups the policy covers

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Applying to Users

By default, a cost policy with no user groups applies to everyone in your organization. To restrict a policy to specific teams, assign it to one or more user groups during creation or editing.

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Enforcement Message

Each cost policy can carry a custom Enforcement Message — set in the create-policy modal under Cost Configuration. When the monthly budget blocks a request, this string replaces the default “Budget exceeded” copy.
  • Leave blank to use the default message.
  • Use Markdown (links, bold) sparingly — most AI tools render the message as plain text.
  • The field takes up to 500 characters. Keep it shorter than that: name the limit and the next step.

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Managing via CLI

List and manage cost policies from the terminal:

CLI Policy Management

Create and manage cost policies from the terminal