Token Budget
A token budget is a hard cap on the tokens or dollars a user, team, or project can spend on AI over a period.
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A token budget is a spending limit expressed in tokens or dollars and scoped to a unit of your organization — a user, a project, a department, or an entire tenant — over a defined window. It is the enforcement half of AI Token FinOps: attribution tells you what was spent, and budgets stop what would be overspent.
The critical difference between a token budget and a cost alert is timing. Alerts and dashboards report overruns after they happen. Because Behest evaluates budgets on the gateway path before the upstream model runs, a request that would breach a cap is blocked or throttled in the moment — so a misconfigured agent in a retry loop cannot quietly move the quarterly forecast.
Setting budgets
Budgets can be layered: a generous tenant-wide ceiling, tighter per-project caps, and per-user limits derived from a tier. When a cap is reached, you choose the behavior — hard block, throttle, or route to a cheaper model — so cost control never has to mean an outage for the people shipping with AI.
Frequently asked questions
How does Behest enforce budgets before the provider invoice?
Unlike basic observability tools that only report costs after the fact, Behest sits in the request path. You can set hard token or dollar budgets per project, user, or department. If a request would exceed the budget, Behest blocks it instantly—preventing runaway costs before they hit your OpenAI or Anthropic invoice.