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Usage Policies

Set guardrails on how much a bot consumes, with automatic alerts and blocking when token, message, or conversation thresholds are crossed.

Usage policies put guardrails on how much a bot consumes, so cost overruns and runaway loops get caught automatically instead of showing up on an invoice. Each policy watches a single metric - tokens, messages, or conversations - against a threshold you set over a rolling time window, and the moment the threshold is crossed the policy's actions fire.

Because counting happens at the usage-recording layer, every token, message, and conversation a bot consumes is accounted for in real time, so enforcement is immediate.

What You Can Do

  • Watch a metric: Track tokens, messages, or conversations against a threshold over a rolling window.
  • Send alerts: Email the account owner or a specific list of recipients, deduplicated to once per window so a sustained breach sends a single heads-up.
  • Block automatically: Temporarily pause a bot for a duration you choose to stop spend before usage keeps climbing.
  • Scope policies: Attach a policy to a single bot, or leave it global to cover every bot in the account.
  • Configure programmatically: Manage policies through the dashboard or the Policy API.

How It Works

As usage is recorded, ChatBotKit counts it against each policy in a fixed window. A policy must define at least one action, and you can combine alerting and blocking. Both a bot's own policies and account-wide policies are evaluated together on each usage event, so a misconfigured prompt, a traffic spike, or an agent stuck in a loop is caught the moment it happens - and the bot can pause itself automatically until you take a look.

Setup

Open the Policies section of the dashboard and create a usage policy. Choose the metric, threshold, and time window, then add an email action, a block action, or both. Attach it to a specific bot or leave it global. The Policy API is available for programmatic setup.

Practical Uses

Set a generous monthly ceiling for billing peace of mind, a tighter per-hour cap to catch abuse, or a notify-only policy that simply keeps you informed as a bot scales. Usage policies pair well with usage analytics, giving you both visibility into consumption and automatic guardrails against overspend.

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