Reference · Glossary

Token budget

A **cap on tokens** per request, user, or day — prevents runaway spend from long contexts or agent loops.

#When to use

Production agents, free tiers, and batch jobs with fixed margins.

#When not to

Research notebooks where cost is irrelevant — still useful as a sanity check.

#Example

Hard stop at 8k output tokens per chat; daily org budget alert at 1M tokens.