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usezombie enforces budgets at two levels: per-agent ceilings declared in TRIGGER.md, and a tenant-wide balance that every run debits against.
Free until July 31, 2026. During the launch trial, hosted execution is free — the tenant-wallet mechanics below apply after the trial. See pricing.

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Per-agent ceilings (daily_dollars / monthly_dollars)

Every agent declares its own dollar ceilings in TRIGGER.md: 
budget:
  daily_dollars: 5.0
  monthly_dollars: 29.0
  • daily_dollars caps spend over a rolling 24-hour window.
  • monthly_dollars caps spend over the calendar month.
When either ceiling is reached the agent stops processing new events and a budget breach is recorded in the activity stream. This is the first line of defence — one bad prompt never becomes an infinite burn on a single agent. Per-event token and wall-clock caps are internal runtime controls. They are not user-configurable in TRIGGER.md today.

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Tenant wallet

Separately, your tenant has a single wallet (the $5 free credit at signup, topped up via Stripe). Every completed run debits this wallet.
  • The wallet is tenant-scoped, not workspace-scoped. All workspaces under your tenant share the same pool.
  • When the wallet hits zero, runs across all workspaces stop until the tenant tops up.
  • The wallet balance is visible in the dashboard header and via zombiectl billing show.
Set a monthly spend cap on your tenant from the billing page at app.usezombie.com/billing.
A zombiectl billing budget set CLI command is planned for a future release.

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Run cancellation

Cancel an in-flight run at any time via CLI or API: 
zombiectl kill <zombie_id>
Cancelling stops the run at the next lease renewal. The run time already elapsed is metered and debited — cancelling doesn’t refund the work done so far. See Credit deduction timing below for the full rule.

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Credit deduction timing

Credit is metered continuously while a run executes: each background lease renewal debits the elapsed time slice from your tenant balance, and a final settle covers the last partial slice when the run ends. Because billing accumulates as the run proceeds, a run that is cancelled or fails partway through is still charged for the time it actually ran — only a run that never starts, or fails before its first metered slice, costs nothing. The same single tenant wallet is debited for every run, across all workspaces.