CBUDGET: per-tenant spend you can see before the invoice does
Token spend is usually a month-end surprise. CBUDGET tracks per-tenant token and dollar consumption in real time and surfaces alerts, so a runaway tenant is a notification, not a billing shock.
LLM spend has a nasty shape: it's invisible until the invoice, and by then it's spent. CBUDGET makes it legible per tenant in real time — token counts and dollar estimates accumulated as traffic flows, queryable with CBUDGET GET, with CBUDGET ALERTS surfacing the tenants approaching or crossing their thresholds.
Per-tenant is the granularity that matters, because spend problems are almost always local: one tenant's runaway loop, one customer's pathological workload, one integration gone wrong. A global number hides them; a per-tenant breakdown points straight at the cause while there's still time to act.
The wall is enforced before the invoice, not discovered on it.
It pairs naturally with the cache's whole reason for existing. Every hit Crowkis serves is spend that didn't happen, and CBUDGET shows the spend that did — so you see both the bill and the savings against it, per tenant, on the same dashboard. The cache's value stops being a claim and becomes a number you can point at.
The bottom line
You can't manage what you can't see, and you definitely can't manage it a month late. CBUDGET moves spend from the post-mortem to the present tense, where it's still a decision instead of a regret.