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Spend caps

Settings → Spend Caps (/gravity/settings/spend-caps) lets an organization set a monthly soft and hard cloud spending limit, and shows current spend against it. It’s a separate mechanism from your Sencai bill - this screen is entirely about what you spend with your own cloud providers, tracked inside Sencai.

Setting a cap

Section titled “Setting a cap”

A spend cap has:

  • Soft cap (EUR) - the alert threshold
  • Hard cap (EUR) - the block threshold; must be a larger number than the soft cap
  • Notification emails - a comma-separated list to alert on the soft-cap threshold
  • An enforcement active toggle

A cap is opt-in. Until an organization configures one, there’s no spending limit in place at all - the screen says so plainly with a Set a spend cap prompt.

Once a cap exists, the screen shows four figures (current period spend, soft cap, hard cap, and a count of any safety overrides - see below), a progress bar colored green under 80% of the hard cap, yellow between 80% and 100%, and red at or over it, plus the cap’s active status and period dates.

A cap applies to whichever organization you currently have selected - there’s no way to set a single spend cap across more than one organization at once, even if you’re a member of several.

Validation

Section titled “Validation”

The form enforces one rule beyond the required fields: the soft cap must be strictly less than the hard cap. Try to save a soft cap equal to or higher than the hard cap and the form blocks the save with an inline validation message rather than letting you submit an inconsistent pair.

Who can change a cap

Section titled “Who can change a cap”

Creating an organization’s first spend cap requires the Member role or higher. Editing an existing cap requires Admin or Owner - once a cap is in place, raising or lowering it is treated as a more sensitive action than setting one up in the first place. Every create and update is written to the audit log.

What happens when spend approaches or crosses a cap

Section titled “What happens when spend approaches or crosses a cap”

By design, crossing the soft cap is meant to send an email alert to the configured addresses, and crossing the hard cap is meant to block new non-safety-critical spending operations while letting safety-critical ones (security patches, incident response, backup and restore, emergency shutdown, compliance scans) through regardless - that carve-out is described directly on the settings screen itself, and any time it’s used, it’s recorded in the Safety Overrides count with an audit trail entry.

Current period spend resets to zero on the first of each month regardless of whether anything was actually spent - it isn’t recomputed from your cost records at reset time, just zeroed and started fresh.

Notifications

Section titled “Notifications”

The comma-separated addresses in Notification emails are only ever used for the soft-cap alert described above - they’re not consulted for anything else on this screen, and removing them just means nobody is notified on a soft-cap crossing (should the alert actually fire - see the caution above). There’s no separate in-app notification toggle for spend caps; email is the only configured channel.

What’s next

Section titled “What’s next”