Spend cap
A spend cap is a hard upper limit on AI spending for an account, a key or a period. When it is reached, requests stop instead of running up more cost.
Why it matters for companies
A cap and an alert are different controls. An alert tells someone after the money is spent; a cap stops the spending.
Providers set caps of their own. Anthropic gives each Claude API usage tier a monthly spend cap, and lets an organization set its own lower limit.
Example
Finance sets a company-wide monthly cap for pay-as-you-go usage. When it is reached, requests stop until the next period or until finance raises the cap.
How Standard Compute handles it
Every person and app gets a fixed monthly budget that never overruns, and you can set spending caps per key and for the whole company. Optional top-off from a prepaid company balance keeps critical agents running.