# Budgets and metering

> Credit metering with no bypass, a per-employee monthly limit that denies by default, lazy period rollover, and suspension that refuses rather than falling back to a service identity

Source: https://aipril.dev/docs/harness/budgets

## Metering

Every model call runs through one transport and one metering decorator, with a source-scanning
boundary test failing the build on a direct call site - see
[The invocation contour](https://aipril.dev/docs/harness/invocation.md). A limit is worth what the least-instrumented path
around it is worth, so the absence of that path is enforced, not assumed.

- **An organisation's own provider key is not metered by the platform.** Metering no-ops when the
  resolved provider is not the platform's.
- **Billing is idempotent per attempt.** Each attempt derives a fresh request id, so a retried call
  bills once. Against the credit engine's replay rule, a constant request id unbills rather than
  double-bills.

## Per-employee budgets

Beyond organisation-level credits, an individual
[AI employee](https://aipril.dev/docs/ai-organisation/employees.md) - a specific assignment to a specific position -
carries its own monthly budget:

| Property | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Limit | Hard, per assignment, per month |
| No budget set | Over limit. A newly hired employee is refused until a limit is set. |
| Period rollover | Lazy - evaluated on read, so no scheduled job is required |
| Suspension | A state with a reason, surfaced on the roster beside limit and spend |
| Exhaustion | Refuses. It does not fall back to a service identity. |

The last row is the one that decides whether the rest is real: a budget exhausted **between retries**
refuses under the employee's own identity instead of continuing under an unlimited one. A test pins
that behaviour.

Spend accrues against the assignment on both paths a digital employee runs on - the workflow activity
and the execution bridge - so cost attributes to the employee, not only to the organisation.

## Cost per staffing unit

Settled spend, summed by month for a given assignment, on the employee's work card beside the limit
and the suspension state. It is drawn from the same credit ledger the holds settle against.

## Rate limits

Separate from money, per dimension: chat requests per IP and per user, MCP requests per IP, analysis
requests per user, message size, rows returned per call, tool-calling rounds per turn, session
history length with a TTL.

The tool-call round cap bounds spend within a single turn independently of the budget.