Budgets & FinOps Cloud / Team

Track, allocate, and restrict LLM token costs to prevent runaway agent spend and optimize development budgets.

Why Budget Controls Matter

Agentic coding workflows can trigger thousands of parallel LLM calls, quickly generating significant API spend. Intutic's FinOps Budget Gate protects your organization from unexpected billing spikes by enforcing spend boundaries at every layer.

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Setting Up Budget Limits

Per-Workspace Budgets

Configure spending limits from the dashboard (Settings → Billing) or via environment variables:

Variable	Description
INTUTIC_BUDGET_DAILY_USD	Maximum daily spend in USD. Requests are blocked once reached
INTUTIC_BUDGET_MONTHLY_USD	Maximum monthly spend in USD

Developer Budget Tiers

Assign developers to budget tiers that match their role and usage needs:

Tier	Cap Level	Intended For
Junior	Strict	Junior engineers or experimental features
Senior	Balanced	Standard operational budget for senior engineers
Staff	High	Heavy coding sessions or complex projects
Principal	Generous	Large-scale test pipelines and architectural work

TIP

Start with conservative budgets and increase as you understand your team's usage patterns. The FinOps dashboard helps you identify trends.

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How Enforcement Works

Each API request flowing through the proxy is checked against budget limits:

1. Cost estimation — The proxy calculates the estimated cost using model pricing data and token counting multipliers
2. Budget check — The estimated cost is compared against the developer's remaining daily/monthly budget
3. Decision — If the request would exceed the budget, it's blocked with a KILL enforcement action

Enforcement Modes & Connectivity

Intutic's budget enforcer operates in two distinct modes depending on connection status:

1. Active GKE/SaaS Enforcement (Connected Mode)

• Centralized Caps: Daily and monthly budgets are managed centrally.
• Valkey Cache Validation: The GKE control plane caches billing limits and cumulative workspace usage counters in Valkey. The proxy performs a fast-path cache precheck (check_workspace_hard_block) in under <1ms p99 latency for every incoming request.
• Heartbeat Sync: Actual query costs update Valkey counters and PostgreSQL in real time upon successful completions.

2. Local Fallback Enforcer (Standalone / Offline Mode)

• Local Budget Definition: The local proxy loads your daily budget cap (maxDailyBudgetUsd) directly from your local config (~/.intutic/config.json).
• Offline Spend Ledger: Day-accumulated spend is saved in sharded daily files (~/.intutic/logs/local-spend-YYYY-MM-DD.jsonl).
• Pre-flight Cost Interception: Before reaching the LLM provider, a native budget gate plugin estimates query cost based on prompt length and static ratios. If this would exceed the remaining budget, the proxy blocks the request with HTTP 429 Too Many Requests (OVERAGE_HARD_CAP_EXCEEDED error code).
• Offline Telemetry Ingestion: Successful completion costs are calculated, appended to the daily spend ledger, and queued in sharded files ~/.intutic/logs/traces-YYYY-MM-DD.jsonl for sync-back.

Valkey Failure Behavior (Fail-Open)

When Valkey (the in-memory cache used for budget counters) is unavailable, the budget gate fails open — requests are allowed through rather than blocked:

• Availability over enforcement: This is a conscious design decision. During a cache outage, blocking all LLM requests would halt developer productivity across the entire workspace. The budget gate prioritizes availability.
• Structured warning logs: Every request that bypasses the budget check due to Valkey unavailability emits a structured warning log entry, enabling observability dashboards and alerting pipelines to detect prolonged cache outages.
• Automatic recovery: Once Valkey is back online, the budget gate resumes normal enforcement. Spend that occurred during the outage is reconciled via the heartbeat sync process from completion events in PostgreSQL.

WARNING

During a Valkey outage, budget limits are not enforced on the fast path. Monitor your Valkey health and set up alerts for E_CACHE_UNAVAILABLE log events to minimize the enforcement gap window.

Budget Breach Anomalies

When a budget limit is exceeded, Intutic raises one of three anomaly types:

Anomaly Type	Trigger
Budget Breach	A developer or workspace has exceeded their allocated daily or monthly budget
Spawn Budget Breach	A sub-agent fleet has reached its localized budget boundary
Workflow Budget Breach	A multi-step workflow execution has exceeded its set threshold

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Monitoring Usage

Dashboard Widgets

The dashboard surfaces budget utilization in real time:

• Spend vs. Budget — Visual gauge showing spentUsd against totalBudgetUsd
• Daily trend — Spending pattern over the current billing period
• Per-model breakdown — Which LLM models are consuming the most budget
• Per-developer breakdown — Individual spending by team member

Token Utility Classification

Every trace is classified as either:

Classification	Meaning
Useful	The agent's output was productive and valuable
Wasted	The agent looped, hallucinated, or produced unusable output

This classification feeds into the FinOps ledger and helps optimize model routing decisions over time.

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Budget Alerts

Intutic monitors usage trends and generates alerts:

• Threshold warnings — Alerts when spending approaches budget limits (e.g., 80%, 90%)
• Breach notifications — Immediate alerts when a budget is exceeded
• Trend anomalies — Alerts for unusual spending spikes
• Forecast overruns (GA Upgrades) — Projected spend overruns warning that the 30-day forecasted spend is projected to exceed the monthly budget. Dispatched immediately to corporate Slack channels.

All budget events are logged to the budget_alerts table and appear as governance incidents in the dashboard.

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CLI Budget Management

You can inspect your remaining budget limits and active task loops directly from your terminal:

intutic budget

This returns a clear breakdown containing:

• Cloud Budget Status: Remaining daily/monthly spend and limits from the control plane.
• Local Spending Cap: Your global daily limit configured in ~/.intutic/config.json.
• Active Task Loops: Running loops, names, accumulated costs, and localized budget limits.

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CFO FinOps Ledger & Chargebacks (Enterprise)

For large-scale enterprise environments, Intutic includes a dedicated CFO FinOps Dashboard mapping agent costs directly to financial business structures:

• General Ledger (GL) Mapping: Automatically maps API usage costs to corporate cost centers (such as department codes, project IDs, or client billing codes).
• Chargeback Re-invoicing: Computes aggregated chargeback reports at the end of every period, matching plan tiers (e.g. ent_sub), consumption metrics, and customized overage rates.
• Async Report Exports: Generate and download detailed corporate financial PDF and CSV reports compiled through background worker jobs.

Resolving Budget Alerts

Security and FinOps administrators can review all active budget breaches on the Incidents Page. When resolving a breach, administrators can record:

• Resolution Status: RESOLVED status marking once action has been taken (e.g., plan tier upgraded, limits adjusted).
• Audit Trails: Record resolvedBy and resolutionNote to maintain SOC 2 compliance logs for financial audit records.

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Related

• Settings & Configuration — Configure workspace budgets
• Core Concepts — Budget tiers and anomaly types
• Activity Logs (Traces) — Token utility classification