---
title: Stopping a run
description: You can stop work mid-flight. What survives, what is thrown away, and what happens to money already spent.
---

You can stop work at any point. In a chat, use **Stop**. For work you handed off, use
the control on the task itself, which stops the task and moves the same question into
a chat.

Both take effect immediately. Neither returns money that has already been spent.

## Stopping a chat mid-reply

Press **Stop** and the run ends there. You get a reply that says so — it opens by
telling you it stopped at your request before writing a summary — and it names any
files that were already finished, so you know what you still have.

**Finished files survive.** If the run had already produced a document, a spreadsheet,
an image or a site before you stopped it, those are still yours to download. Stopping
is not a rollback.

## Stopping work you handed off

A handed-off task has a stronger version of this. Stopping it does three things, and
the app says all three to your face before you confirm:

> This stops the task and asks the same question in a chat instead. The amount already
> spent stays spent, and the work so far is discarded.

So this one **is** a discard: unlike the chat Stop, the partial work of the task is not
kept. What you get instead is the same request, carried over into a chat where you can
watch it and steer. The task's own status changes to **Turned into a chat**.

Any approval the task was still waiting on is cancelled at the same time — you will not
find an orphaned question sitting in **Needs you** afterwards. Pressing it twice is
harmless; the second press changes nothing.

## What happens to the money

Steps that already finished were already charged as they finished. Stopping does not
un-charge them.

**There is no refund path.** Not a partial one, not a discretionary one — Else has no
mechanism to return money for a run, and we are not going to imply otherwise. That is
the same answer for a run you stopped, a run that failed, and a run that produced
something you did not like.

Two things are true in your favour. Both are about what never gets charged in the first
place — neither is money coming back:

- **A run that consumed nothing is charged nothing**, and produces no receipt rather
  than a $0 one.
- **You are charged for finished steps only.** Stopping mid-step does not add a charge
  for the step that never completed.

## What this means in practice

Stop early rather than late. The cost of a run accumulates step by step, so the useful
moment to intervene is the first time the plan looks wrong — not after you have watched
it go wrong.

If you are unsure whether work is heading somewhere useful, keep the default approval
setting so it comes back to you at each step that matters, and — on work you hand off —
keep its spend limit low. In a chat, setting that number low changes nothing, because
nothing reads it. See [When it checks with you](/docs/when-it-checks-with-you) and
[Spending limits](/docs/spending-limits) — the second of those is honest about both cases.

And check the receipt on the result. It is the record of what was actually charged,
whether or not the run finished.