Budget & cost modes
Capping spend in dollars or traffic, and how a hard cap changes routing rather than just alerting.
What it is
A budget caps how much a service may spend in a billing period — either in money ($) or in egress volume (GB/TB). Most operators cap on traffic because their CDN contracts are volume-committed, so volume is how procurement thinks.
Soft alerts vs the hard cap
Soft thresholds only notify — they tell you spend is approaching the limit. The hard cap actually changes behaviour: once spend crosses 100% of the cap, the engine multiplies the cost weight ×3, so it strongly prefers cheaper CDNs for the rest of the period. Quality may dip in exchange — that is the deliberate trade the cap makes.
Related controls
Budget consumed (%) is also an input other controls can key off — bitrate ceilings and variant filters can tighten automatically as the month's spend climbs, so a busy period doesn't blow the budget. For the inverse trade-off — guaranteeing quality and minimising spend underneath it — see the quality floor.
Standards & references
- ADR-026 — flat platform fee (savings advisory, not billed)