Spend caps that default to safe
The default spend budget, its scope and timing, and the separate zero-balance container grace period.
Behavior reviewed October 9, 2026.
New accounts start with a $50 monthly spend budget and auto-pause enabled. Existing accounts retain their settings. Change the amount or pause setting under Billing & Credits → Spend budget.
What the budget controls
A spend pause restricts AI Gateway requests, dashboard-agent model steps, and autonomous custom-agent work. Background workload reconciliation and metering take time. In-flight work can finish, and delayed charges can arrive, so the budget is not a hard maximum bill.
Hosting, shared databases, object storage, secrets, and static delivery remain outside the budget pause. An idle running container is still allocated compute and can incur charges. Raise or remove the budget, or disable auto-pause, to clear the budget condition. Adding credits alone does not change the budget.
Zero balance has a separate lifecycle
AI and agent requests require available credit. When zero balance is recorded, hosted container projects enter a seven-day grace period. The platform attempts notices at the start, after 84 and 144 hours, and when the hosting pause is applied after 168 hours.
That pause scales container instances to zero. It does not delete their data or stop every service: databases, stored objects, secrets, static delivery, and domain renewals have separate costs and lifecycles. Restore a positive balance to start container recovery, then check project status. Startup is not instant, and any separate budget pause still needs to be cleared.
Auto-reload can help maintain the balance, but card failures or bank verification can require action. Dashboard-agent steps do not trigger it. See auto-reload, spend and balance limits, and Pricing.