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What are Cost Policies?

Cost policies let you set spending limits and budget controls 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 ensure fair resource allocation. Dashboard: 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 — When multiple cost policies cover the same user (for example an org-wide default plus a stricter team budget), the highest-priority policy 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. 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 — one without the other has no effect.
Both the monthly budget and the spend limit are hard blocks rather than warnings: once crossed, further 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 developers see.

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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 can download a full usage report with daily granularity from Billing → Usage → Export

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Setting Up Cost Policies

  1. Go to Cost Policies 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 policy blocks a request, this string is surfaced to the user in place of 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.
  • Keep it short. Long messages get truncated by the agent UI.

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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