Managing User AI Credit Budgets

Once an instance pool has been topped up (see Buying AI Credits), instance admins can hand out personal AI credit budgets to individual users. This is what powers the per-connection budget source — a user with their own per-instance budget can switch a connection to bill that budget instead of their home pool.

This page covers the User Budgets tab on /billing-credits (Manage → AI Credits → User Budgets).

Who can use this

• You must be an Instance Admin of the currently selected instance.
• The User Budgets tab only operates on the instance shown in the header. To manage another instance, switch it on the home screen and re-open Manage → AI Credits.

What the table shows

Every user that has a connection to this instance appears as a row, with:

• User — display name and email. A small home icon marks the user's home instance.
• Balance — the user's current personal AI credit balance (shared across all instances they use).
• This month — credits topped up to this user from this instance's pool in the current calendar month.
• Monthly limit — the cap on how many credits you can transfer from this pool to this user per month. Empty means no cap.
• Auto top-up — Off, or threshold → ceiling when enabled.

Use the search box to filter by name or email.

Top up a user manually

Open the row's ⋯ menu and pick Top up now….

• Source instance — the instance pool you are funding the top-up from (the active one).
• Credits to add — how many credits to move from the pool into the user's personal balance.
• Note — optional, free-text reason. Visible later in the top-up history.

The dialog blocks the action when:

• The pool has fewer credits than you're trying to send.
• The amount would exceed this user's monthly limit on this instance.

On success, the user's balance updates immediately and an entry is written to their top-up history.

Set a monthly limit

Open the row's ⋯ menu and pick Edit settings…, then fill in Monthly top-up limit (credits).

• The limit is enforced per calendar month, per (user, instance) pair.
• Manual top-ups and auto top-ups both count against this limit.
• Leave the field empty to remove the cap entirely.

The dialog shows how much you've already used this month so you can size the cap sensibly.

Configure auto top-up

In the same Edit settings… dialog, switch Auto top-up on and set:

• Threshold — when the user's balance drops below this number of credits, an auto top-up fires.
• Ceiling — auto top-up tops the user up to this number. (It does not add a fixed amount — it brings the balance to the ceiling.)

Rules:

• Ceiling must be greater than threshold.
• Auto top-ups are funded from this instance's pool, so the pool needs enough credits at the time of the run.
• Auto top-ups respect the monthly limit. If a top-up would breach the cap, it is skipped.

Auto top-ups appear in the history with the Auto badge.

View top-up history

The ⋯ menu also has View history, which lists the most recent 100 top-ups for that user — across all instances you have visibility into:

• Date, Type (Manual / Auto / Adjustment), Source instance, Credits, Balance after, Note.

Use it to audit who funded what and to investigate billing questions from your users.

How this ties into per-connection billing

A user's personal balance is the budget that the This instance option in My Connections → Edit Instance → AI credit budget draws from. The option only becomes selectable on a given instance once you, as that instance's admin, have topped the user up there. See AI Credit Budget per Connection for the user-side view.