Spending limits

The spend limit you set on a single message is not applied today — the number is sent to our servers and nothing there reads it. What stops a message is a different ceiling you cannot see or change: a fixed $0.50 per turn. On work you hand off the limit you set is read, but only after money has already been spent.

That is the most important sentence on this page, so it is the first one rather than the last section. Nothing below makes it milder.

Where you set it

In the panel above the composer — the one headed This run — there is a field labelled “Spend limit for this run — Pauses before it would go over.” It arrives pre-filled at $0.15, and you can raise it as high as $5.00.

For a single message that label is wrong on both counts, and we would rather tell you here than let you find out from a receipt: it does not pause, and it is not applied. The field still does one real thing — the amount you type is shown back to you under the composer and printed on the run’s receipt — but it does not govern the run.

There is also a standing preference in Settings, under How it works: “Ask before spending more than — Tasks pause and check with you above this amount,” offered as four presets — $0.10, $0.50, $1.00 and $5.00. Read the word Tasks there literally: it applies to work you hand off, never to a single message, and it is only consulted when a handed-off job was started without a limit of its own.

Those numbers are budgets you choose, not prices. What a run actually costs depends on which engine it runs on — Auto, Fast, Smart or Max — so the same limit buys a different amount of work on each. Nothing on this page is a quote.

What actually stops a single message

A fixed ceiling of $0.50 per turn. It is not a setting, it is not shown to you anywhere, and there is no way to raise or lower it.

Two things follow from how it is checked, and both show up on real receipts:

• It is checked after a step has already been paid for. So a turn does not end at $0.50; it ends at $0.50 plus whatever the step that crossed it cost. On five real runs with the field set to $0.15, four came in between $0.502 and $0.6169 on the Auto tier — a tight band just above $0.50, with no relationship to the $0.15.
• It bounds one turn, not one conversation. A conversation of several turns can spend several times $0.50, because each turn starts the count again.

When it fires, Else tells you — verbatim: “I stopped here because this turn reached its spending limit for a single turn. You were only charged for the work that actually ran. Ask me to continue and I’ll pick up from what’s already done.” That sentence is honest that a limit was hit and silent about which limit, which is exactly how a $0.15 setting can read as respected when it was never consulted. That reading is what this page corrects.

What the limit does do, on handed-off work

Hand a job off and the limit you set is genuinely stored on that job and genuinely checked. A handed-off task shows its own limit and how much of it has gone, as a percentage, on the task’s result page — next to the running total of what has actually been charged. When the total is found over the limit between steps, the task moves to Needs you and waits for you instead of continuing.

Three qualifications, all real:

• It observes, it does not reserve. What it compares is money already spent. It cannot hold budget back before work starts, and it cannot interrupt a step that is running.
• A run that finishes on its own is never limit-checked at all. The check only applies to work that is still going. If a job completes in one go, however far over it went, the limit never gets a say.
• Each individual turn inside a handed-off job is still bounded by the same invisible $0.50, not by the limit you set. Your limit governs the job’s running total between steps; the $0.50 governs each step-loop inside it.

Else will not ask you to raise the limit on its own behalf. That is enforced on our side, not left to the model’s judgement: a request to increase its own spend limit is rejected before it can reach you.

The honest summary

• On a single message: the limit you set does nothing. A fixed $0.50-per-turn ceiling stops the run, and it stops it slightly above $0.50 rather than at it.
• On handed-off work: the limit is real, and it is checked between steps against money already spent — it makes long-running work stop and check with you after the fact, it cannot prevent an overrun, and it says nothing about a job that finishes in a single expensive push.
• On both: the receipt is the record. It is accurate about what you were charged even where the limit was not honoured.

We are fixing the single-message case. Until that ships, the sentence at the top of this page is what the product does, and we would rather write it down here than let you find it on a receipt.

What to do with that

• Do not rely on the field to cap a single message. Today the effective cap on one message is $0.50 and a little, whatever you type.
• For long work you want finished unattended, hand it off — that is the path where your limit is actually read — and raise it deliberately rather than letting a run bump into it repeatedly.
• Watch the running total, not the limit you set. Check the receipt on the result: the receipt is the record of what happened; the limit is only what you asked for.