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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 — Enforcement happens in the Unbound hook that ships with each connected AI tool: once a user’s budget is exhausted, further AI requests from that user are blocked at the source until the month rolls over or an admin raises the budget.
  • 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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Model Cost Optimization

Use model policies to route requests to cost-effective models by default, while keeping expensive models available for complex tasks:
  • Route simple completions to smaller, cheaper models
  • Reserve premium models for tasks that require higher capability
  • Use sensitivity-based routing to only send sensitive data to private (often more expensive) models

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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
  3. Configure model routing rules to optimize costs (see Model Policies)

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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