A budget is a monthly ceiling on how many credits one person or one project may spend. Your workspace has a single pool of credits; a budget stops any one part of the business drawing more than its share of it.
Budgets never grant credits. They only limit. A person inside their ceiling can still be refused if the workspace has run out — and that is the more urgent problem to fix.
Who this is for
Anyone whose credits are spent by more than one person, or on behalf of more than one client:
- An agency capping each client project, so one aggressive audit schedule does not consume the month
- A team lead capping a new specialist while they learn what things cost
- A consultant who bills clients for tooling and needs per-client numbers that stand up
If you are the only person spending, you probably do not need budgets. Watch the balance instead.
Two kinds
Per person — everything they run, across every project, including ones they create. Right for a new hire or a contractor.
Per project — everything anyone runs on that project. Right for a client on a fixed retainer where the tooling cost has to stay inside a number you quoted.
You can set both. When they overlap, the tightest one applies. A specialist with 5,000 credits working a project capped at 1,000 can spend 1,000 there.
Block or warn
Block stops fresh work at the ceiling. Warn notifies and lets it continue.
Use warn when you want visibility without risk of interrupting delivery — a client project mid-launch. Use block on anything where an overspend is a real problem.
Warnings appear at 50%, 80% and 100% of the ceiling either way, so you get notice before anything stops.
A ceiling of zero means frozen
Zero is not "unlimited" — it stops all spending for that scope. Use it to pause a project or a person without removing their access. To lift a ceiling entirely, remove the budget rather than setting it to zero.
What still works at the ceiling
Being blocked stops fresh work — new rank checks, new audits, new research, anything that calls a data provider or a model. It does not lock anyone out.
Everything already gathered still opens: reports, historical rankings, past audits, saved keywords, the work queue. Cached results cost nothing and keep working. A blocked person can still do their job with the data they have, and can still read and export it for a client.
Setting one while you invite
The invite form has a credit budget field. Setting it there is better than meaning to set it afterwards, because afterwards is when it gets forgotten. It applies the moment they accept.
Reading them
The budgets page shows each scope's ceiling, what it has spent this period, and how close it is. Periods run monthly.
If a number looks wrong, check the itemised usage first — most surprises are a schedule running more often than someone remembers rather than a single expensive action.
Next
- What a credit is, and what uses them
- What happens when you run out of credits
- Credit-safe workflows for busy months
- People and access