# Usage Limits & Thresholds

The Zuplo AI Gateway provides hierarchical usage limits and budget controls to
manage LLM spending across your organization. Limits can be set at the
organization, team, and application levels.

## Budget Hierarchy

Budget limits cascade down through your organizational structure:

- **Root Team** - Organization-wide limits (for example, $1,000/day)
- **Sub-Teams** - Team-specific limits that cannot exceed the parent team's
  budget (for example, $500/day for the Engineering team)
- **Applications** - Per-app limits for granular control (for example, $10/day
  for a hackathon project)

A sub-team's budget can never exceed the available budget from its parent team.
Similarly, an application's budget cannot exceed its owning team's budget.

## Configuring Limits

### Daily Budgets

Set a maximum daily spend for a team or application. When the daily budget is
reached, requests are either blocked or flagged with a warning depending on your
enforcement configuration.

To configure daily budgets:

1. Navigate to your AI Gateway project in the
   [Zuplo Portal](https://portal.zuplo.com)
2. Select the **Teams** or **Apps** tab
3. Click on the team or app to edit
4. Select the **Usage & Limits** tab and configure the **Daily Budget** field
5. Click **Save Changes**

### Monthly Budgets

Set a maximum monthly spend for applications. Monthly budgets reset on the first
day of each calendar month.

### Rate Limits

In addition to budget-based limits, you can configure request rate limits to
control the volume of requests flowing through the gateway.

## Enforcement Modes

When a limit is reached, the AI Gateway can operate in two modes:

- **Enforce** - Requests are blocked and an error response is returned to the
  caller
- **Warn** - Requests are allowed through but a warning notification is
  generated

## Monitoring Usage

Track current usage and spending through the AI Gateway dashboard:

1. Navigate to your AI Gateway project
2. Click on an app and select **Dashboard**
3. View real-time metrics including:
   - Request count
   - Token usage (input and output)
   - Current spending against budget
   - Time to first byte

## Semantic Caching

Enable semantic caching on applications to reduce costs by identifying and
returning cached responses for similar prompts. This can significantly reduce
token usage and spending, especially for applications with repeated or similar
queries.

To enable semantic caching:

1. Navigate to the **Apps** tab and click on the app to edit
2. Enable the **Semantic Caching** toggle under **Advanced Features**
3. Save your changes

## Related Resources

- [Getting Started](./getting-started.mdx) - Set up your first AI Gateway
  project with budget controls
- [Managing Teams](./managing-teams.mdx) - Configure team-level budgets
- [Managing Apps](./managing-apps.mdx) - Configure app-level limits