Two levels of budget
Budgets work at two levels. The colony cap is the most the whole company can spend in a month, and it is a hard ceiling: the org cannot spend past it. Per-agent caps limit any single role so one expensive agent cannot eat the whole budget before the others get to work.
Set the colony cap to a number that would not hurt if you spent all of it. That figure is what lets you say go and stop watching the meter.
How the colony respects the cap
As spend approaches the cap, the CEO slows discretionary work, finishes what is committed, and tells you that you are near the ceiling rather than blowing through it. The number you watch day to day is a single line: spent so far this month, out of the cap.
Scaling up safely
When a project proves it returns more than it costs, raising its cap is a deliberate decision backed by the audit trail, not a vague feeling. Start tight, prove value, then fund what works.
This is the bootstrapped-company pattern applied to your colony. You do not fund a project because you hope it will work; you fund it because the record shows it already returns more than it spends. Raising a cap should feel like a decision a careful board would make, with the evidence in front of it.
Reading spend against budget
The number you watch day to day is a single line: spent so far this month, out of the cap. When that line is comfortable, money is not something you think about. When it climbs faster than expected, the audit trail tells you exactly which agents and which projects drove the change, so you are never guessing about where the money went.
If spend is trending to overshoot, you have two honest levers: trim the work that is not returning, or raise the cap deliberately because the work is worth it. The one thing the platform will not do is quietly blow past the cap, because the cap is a hard ceiling, not a suggestion.
Budgets and model tiers
Budget and model tier are the two dials that set your economics. A colony where decisions run on a reasoning model and execution runs on a fast one will cost a fraction of one where everything runs on the strongest model. If your spend line is higher than you expect, the first place to look is whether any agent is over-tiered for the work it actually does.
This article is part of the launch docs set; boundaries and depth are still being reviewed with engineering and will keep sharpening.
