Budget Control

Cap your monthly upstream BYOK spend. Verdict: BLOCK, DOWNGRADE or LIGHT_ONLY.

Guardian protects you from runaway agents at the behavioral level. Budget Control protects your wallet: you set a monthly cap on the upstream cost HiWay is allowed to incur against your provider keys, and HiWay enforces it with one of three verdicts.

The three verdicts

Verdict	Triggered at	Behavior
`BLOCK`	100% of monthly cap	Requests rejected with 402, upstream never called
`DOWNGRADE`	90% of monthly cap	Routing is forced down one tier (e.g. heavy → standard)
`LIGHT_ONLY`	95% of monthly cap	Every request pinned to the light tier until month reset

Configuration

Open Dashboard → Budget Control. Set the monthly USD cap, the verdict thresholds (defaults shown above), and optional Slack / email alert webhooks. The cap resets on the first of the month UTC.

This caps *upstream* cost, not HiWay cost

The cap tracks what your provider keys get billed (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.). HiWay's own subscription is flat — it's not affected by Budget Control.

402 response shape

json

{
  "error": {
    "code":           "budget_exceeded",
    "message":        "Monthly BYOK budget cap reached ($500.00 / $500.00).",
    "verdict":        "BLOCK",
    "cap_usd":        500.0,
    "spent_usd":      500.02,
    "reset_at":       "2026-05-01T00:00:00Z"
  }
}