Budget Controls
Per-day and per-month spend caps with automatic tier degradation.
Strict spend protection prevents you from overspending what you hold. Budget Controls prevent you from spending what you don't want to spend. They sit on top of your credit balance and act as a self-imposed circuit breaker.
What you can configure
- Daily cap — maximum spend per UTC day. When reached, requests are blocked with 429.
- Monthly cap — same, scoped to the calendar month.
- Single-request cap — block any individual request whose estimated cost exceeds N dollars (catches misconfigured agents).
- Auto-degrade at 80% — when 80% of the daily budget is spent, HiWay automatically downgrades requests to the lower tier.
- Auto-degrade at 95% — at 95%, force every request to the light tier.
- Off-hours rule — between two configurable hours (default 01:00–06:00 UTC), pin everything to the cheapest tier.
Presets
Open Dashboard → Budget and pick one of the four presets, or build your own:
Preset cheatsheet
| Preset | Daily cap | Monthly cap | Per-request |
|---|---|---|---|
| Default | $50 | $500 | $1.00 |
| Startup | $10 | $200 | $0.50 |
| Enterprise | $200 | $5,000 | $2.00 |
| Unlimited | — | — | — |
Auto-degrade is silent by design
When the engine downgrades a tier because you're at 85% of your daily budget, the response still comes back successfully — only the routing header tells you a different model answered. Watch the Routing Log tab if you suspect a quality drop.