Clovie Concepts
Budgets and price books
Budgets set how much your agents and teams may spend. Price books make sure every cost uses the rates you actually pay.
Clovie prices every request your agents make and attributes the cost to the agent, its team and any budget that covers it. Two tools shape those numbers: budgets decide how much may be spent, and price books decide what each token costs.
Budgets
A budget is an amount of money for a period, for example "$5,000 a month for the Payments team's agents". You create budgets in AI Governance → Costs → Budgets with Create budget.
What a budget can cover
A budget can cover your whole organization or a slice of it: a business unit, a team, a project, an environment, a single agent, a user, an API key, a model or a provider. You can also build a budget from filters, share one budget between several teams, or split it into one budget per user, per agent or per team.
Period and amount
Choose a Budget period: monthly, quarterly, annual or custom dates. The amount can be Fixed (the same every period), Planned (a different amount for each upcoming period) or Auto-adjust (follows your average spend over recent periods).
Thresholds and actions
Thresholds say what happens as spend grows, based on actual spend or on forecast spend. Each threshold has an action:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Notify only | Sends an alert. Traffic is not affected. |
| Throttle (switch to lowest-cost model) | New requests go to the lowest-cost allowed model until the period resets. |
| Hard stop (block requests) | New requests are rejected until the period resets or the budget is raised. |
Monitor, then enforce
Like policies, every budget starts in Monitor mode: you get alerts, and traffic is never changed. When you are ready, select Switch to enforce. Clovie first shows you what the budget would have throttled or blocked over the last 7 days, so there are no surprises.
When an enforced budget hard-stops a request, the agent receives an HTTP 429 error with the code budget_exceeded. If a team needs more room before the period ends, an administrator can add a temporary increase.
Limits
Next to budgets, Limits cap the cost of a single request, a single agent run, or the spend or tokens in a time window, such as a minute or an hour. They protect you from a runaway loop long before a monthly budget would notice.
Price books
By default, Clovie prices requests at each provider's standard list price. If you have negotiated rates, a committed-use discount or an enterprise agreement, record it as a price book, a set of negotiated prices, in AI Governance → Costs → More → Negotiated prices.
A price book holds rates per provider, model and region: a price per million input tokens, output tokens and cached input tokens, or a discount percentage, each with a start date. Every cost Clovie shows uses these rates: live request costs, budgets, cost reports and chargeback statements. If several price books match, the one with the lower priority number wins.
When you change rates, select Reprice past usage to recalculate an earlier period. Clovie adds dated adjustments rather than rewriting the original records, so your history stays auditable.
Where to see spend
- AI Governance → Costs → Overview shows this month's spend, the forecast and the budgets that need attention.
- AI Governance → Costs → Cost explorer breaks spend down by team, agent, model, provider and more.
- AI Governance → Costs → More → Statements produces monthly chargeback and showback statements per team and cost center.
Policies, monitor and enforce
Policies decide what your agents may do. Every policy starts in monitor mode and only blocks traffic after you promote it to enforce.
Products and plans
What is included in your Clovie subscription, how it is billed, and what you see when a feature is not part of your plan.