Budget caps

Overview

A budget cap* is a spending limit for Ottili Cloud: a maximum amount your company (or a single project) may spend on cloud resources in a billing period. Once the limit is reached, the cloud stops further provisioning and further billable usage before unexpected overspend occurs.

Budget caps share the same company-scoped foundation as the rest of Ottili Cloud: every resource belongs to exactly one company (company_id), every action is authenticated through Ottili Auth, and every billing-relevant decision is audited.

Ottili Cloud is in Early Access* today. Compute is reachable through the Early Access program; budget caps are delivered through the cloud billing and quota engine and are being introduced incrementally through the cloud APIs and the billing controls in the console. Where a surface is not yet available as self-service, this article says so plainly.

What a budget cap limits

A budget cap limits money*, not resources. That is what distinguishes it from quotas:

• Budget cap (money):* a maximum spend per company or project and period.
• Quota (resource):* a maximum number of resources — such as instances, vCPUs, RAM, storage or API rates (see [Cloud quotas](/docs/cloud-quotas)).

Both are enforced company-scoped and work together: a quota prevents too many resources from running; a budget cap prevents those resources from exceeding the set spending limit.

How enforcement works

Enforcement runs through the same engine that powers Ottili Cloud billing:

• Company-scoped usage:* every billable action is attributed to your company; spend is reported per company and per project.
• Quota and budget check:* before new resources are provisioned, the engine checks the remaining quota and budget. If either is insufficient, the action is rejected with a clear error — no unintended overspend occurs.
• Audit:* every budget and quota decision is recorded in an audit trail.

This engine is part of the Ottili Cloud platform; it is company-scoped and shares the access and audit model of the rest of the platform.

Where you control budget caps

• Cloud APIs:* programmatic access to billing and quotas goes through the public cloud control-plane API at /api/v1/cloud. Changing budgets and quotas requires the cloud:billing:manage permission; read access requires cloud:billing:read.
• Console:* the billing controls in the Ottili Cloud console are where budget caps are introduced as self-service. During Early Access not every field is fully visible as self-service yet; where that is the case, it is stated on the product and status pages.
• Roles and permissions:* who may set budgets follows the same roles as the rest of the platform (see [Roles and permissions](/docs/roles-and-permissions)).

Status and availability

Ottili Cloud is in Early Access* (not generally available). Budget caps are delivered as part of cloud spend control through the billing and quota engine; the self-service console surface is being introduced incrementally. We do not publish invented prices, limits or SLAs for capabilities that are not yet defined.

How Ottili ONE labels maturity publicly is described in [Understand feature status labels](/docs/understand-feature-status-labels).

Related

• The [Ottili Cloud overview](/docs/ottili-cloud) describes the platform and its Early Access status.
• [Cloud billing](/docs/cloud-billing) explains how usage and credits work during Early Access.
• [Cloud quotas](/docs/cloud-quotas) bound resources per company and project.
• [Cloud projects](/docs/cloud-projects) group resources for billing and access.
• [Cloud accounts](/docs/cloud-accounts) are the billing boundary.
• [Cloud APIs](/docs/cloud-apis) provide programmatic access to provisioning and billing.