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Budgets

A budget is what you expect to spend over a period. Crossing one raises an alert; it does not stop anyone working. Lineman reports and warns, it does not cut people off mid-task.

Three periods, set independently

You can set a daily, a weekly and a monthly budget. They are independent: a daily budget catches a bad afternoon, a monthly one catches a slow drift that no single day would flag. Leaving one unset simply means it is not checked.

Warning before the limit, not after

A budget alone would only tell you once the money was gone. Thresholds are the percentages at which you want warning: the defaults are 50, 75, 90 and 100 percent.

  • At least one threshold has to stay selected. A budget with no thresholds could never raise anything, which looks like a broken feature rather than a deliberate choice.
  • Fewer thresholds mean fewer, louder alerts. If your team is ignoring them, remove the early ones rather than turning budgets off.

Per-person budgets

A company budget can hide one person spending far more than everyone else. A per-member budget sets a different expectation for one person, and raises against that instead. Useful both ways: a higher limit for someone doing heavy migration work, a lower one for an account you want to keep tight.

What a budget does not do

Crossing a budget does not block anyone, throttle a session or stop work. It raises an alert. If you need spend to actually stop, that is your provider's spend controls, not this.