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Automation budgets limit recorded spending for a run or a daily scope. Use them to bound unattended work and stop further runs when an Automation, project, or workspace exhausts its allowance.
Nested budget scopes: workspace per day, project per day, Automation per day and one run, beside the sequence of an 80 percent warning, a breach that pauses the Automation, and republishing to clear the pause.

Four caps apply to a run. A breach pauses the Automation until you republish.

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Choose spending caps

Caps are expressed in US dollars. Every applicable cap constrains the run. All four fields are optional in the budget model. An unset cap places no limit at that level.
Publishing an ordinary Automation as a non-admin workspace member requires both definition caps: at most $25 per run and $100 per day for the Automation. Admin publishers are exempt from these ceilings and required fields. Follow-ups and generated Automations have separate publication exceptions. Project and workspace caps remain optional.
A project or workspace cap still applies when the Automation’s own cap is absent. Removing one cap does not remove the others.

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Set caps for an Automation

You need edit access to the Automation.
  1. Open the Automation and select Definition.
  2. Configure the budget policy in the draft. In JSON, set policies.budget.per_run_usd and policies.budget.per_day_usd to the limits you want.
  3. Review validation errors and any member publication limits.
  4. Publish the draft and confirm the publication.
The published plan carries these two limits. Editing a draft does not change limits pinned to an existing run. Settings shows the Automation’s published behavior, including its configured budgets. It shows the draft’s behavior before the first publication.

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Set shared caps

A person with edit access to a project can set or clear the project’s daily cap, but the project page has no control for it yet. Contact Athena support to set one. An admin can set the current workspace’s daily cap in Environment, Automations admin, Policies. A workspace owner or manager role alone does not give access to this control. Clearing a shared cap removes the limit at that level. A shared daily cap of zero admits no new run.

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Understand daily accounting

Daily accounting starts at midnight UTC. A run belongs to the UTC day on which it was created, including costs recorded after that day ends. Daily totals include settled costs for ended runs and recorded step costs for runs still in progress. Run costs come from recorded step spending, including child agent or AOP sessions and model judgment steps.
Budget enforcement checks recorded costs. It checks again after cost-bearing records and final settlement, so a cap can be crossed before the pause is applied. Treat it as a spending control that reacts to recorded usage.

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Understand warnings and pauses

Before starting a run, Athena checks for an existing budget pause and for daily caps with no room left. Spending at or above a daily cap refuses admission with budget_exceeded. At 80% of a daily cap, Athena records an automation.budget.warning event, once per scope per UTC day. When recorded spending exceeds a cap during execution, Athena fails the crossing step with budget_exceeded, pauses the affected Automations, and records an automation.budget.exceeded event. Configured pause notification recipients are notified. The pause blocks manual runs as well as managed triggers. Final settlement can also discover a breach and apply a pause after a run ends. In that case, the ended run keeps its recorded status.

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Resume after a budget pause

A new UTC day does not clear the pause. Raising a cap also leaves the pause in place until you clear it.
  1. Read the pause reason to identify the breached scope, limit, and recorded spending.
  2. Wait for daily allowance to become available or have an authorized editor or admin change the relevant cap.
  3. Review the Automation’s draft and republish it to clear its budget pause and re-enable the configured triggers. Republishing can activate triggers, so review them before confirming.
  4. Check run history after the next execution starts.
The Resume control clears pauses made by a person. It does not clear a budget pause. Republish to clear it. Neither resuming nor republishing raises a cap. The next run must still pass every applicable budget check. A project or workspace breach can leave several Automations paused; clearing one Automation’s pause does not clear the others.