Spend Gate
The Spend Gate keeps Sivants-billed AI spend from drifting past what you expect. It works in two stages — a soft cap and a hard ceiling — and resets automatically each day.
Two thresholds
Section titled “Two thresholds”Soft cap — spend below this threshold is covered by your subscription at no additional cost. Once your daily usage crosses the soft cap, further Sivants-billed calls draw from your Sivants Credits balance instead of subscription coverage.
Hard ceiling — when daily spend reaches the hard ceiling, all Sivants-billed calls are blocked for the rest of the day. No further credits are consumed; calls that would have gone through the proxy simply fail with a clear gate-blocked message.
Raising the ceiling
Section titled “Raising the ceiling”If you need to push past the hard ceiling on the same day, an owner-level manual override is available. The override raises the ceiling for the rest of that calendar day and resets at midnight America/New_York along with the rest of the daily counters. There is no automatic daily raise — every ceiling increase requires a deliberate action.
BYOK exemption
Section titled “BYOK exemption”The Spend Gate applies only to Sivants-billed calls. Calls that run through your own provider keys — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or any other key stored in the Vault — are never gated, blocked, or counted against the daily thresholds. Free and local Orbit operations are also unaffected.
Outage behavior
Section titled “Outage behavior”If the Sivants API is unreachable when the gate needs to check spend state, the soft cap fails open — calls are allowed through. The local hard ceiling continues to enforce regardless of API reachability.