User budgets: spending allowances for creators
User budgets put a spending allowance on each creator in your organization, so no single person can drain the shared pool. You find them under Organization Management → Credits → Budget management → User budgets. New to usage banks? Start with the overview: Usage & Budgets: how organization billing works.
💡 An allowance is a total, not a monthly quota. Usage counts up until you reset it — nothing rolls over at the start of a month.
The creator list
Every creator in your organization is listed, always — there is no switch to turn the feature on, and nobody is hidden. Here “creator” means every member with the Creator or Teacher role, plus organization admins. Each row shows:
- Creator — their name.
- Allowance — a number, or Unlimited. A creator who has no value of their own shows the account default marked (default), so you can always tell an inherited value from one someone chose.
- Used — “X of Y used”, with a Near limit or Blocked chip when it matters.
Above the list, one editable sentence states the account default: “New and unset creators get N credits in total”. Change edits the number and Make it unlimited removes it. With no default set, a creator who has no allowance of their own is unlimited.
Use Search creators to find someone in a long list. To narrow the list by status, pick an option under Show:
- All creators — everyone, the default.
- Blocked — creators who have used their whole allowance. Their learners cannot start runs.
- No allowance (0) — creators whose allowance is zero, so their activities cannot start at all.
- Near the limit — creators close to their allowance.
- Unlimited — creators with no cap.
Search and Show work together, so you can find a blocked creator by name.
Changing one creator
On any row, Change allowance sets a number or makes that person unlimited. Use default hands them back to the account default, and the row goes back to reading (default).
Changing several at once
Tick the rows you want — or Select all creators — and a selection bar appears with three actions:
- Set allowance — every selected creator gets that allowance in total. Recorded usage is unchanged.
- Set unlimited — the same, with no cap.
- Reset usage — see below.
To switch allowances off entirely, select everyone and choose Set unlimited. There is no master switch, on purpose: the result is visible in the list afterwards and you can reverse it the same way, whereas a hidden switch left the list saying one thing and the platform doing another.
Resetting usage
Reset is the one action here you cannot undo, so it lives only in the selection bar and its confirmation names how many people it will affect: “Recorded usage drops to zero and cannot be recovered. Allowances are unchanged.” Typical use is the start of a semester or a budget year. Selecting every creator resets the whole account in one operation.
What counts against an allowance
A creator’s meter counts the pool spending they are responsible for:
- Runs in workspaces they own — learner runs are charged to the space owner, whoever actually runs them.
- Charged usage they start themselves outside a space, such as direct runs or translations when your plan prices them.
Runs funded by a project budget are metered by that budget instead and do not count against the creator’s allowance — one run is never counted twice. See Project budgets.
Usage that is free for your organization — testing runs and Professor Cesura builds — costs the pool nothing and so consumes no allowance. What limits those is the fair-use policy, not this tab. See Pricing & Limits and Fair use and the credit chip.
When an allowance runs out
Activities owned by that creator stop starting, and learners see Budget used up: “This activity can’t start — its creator’s spending budget is used up. Please contact your administrator.” Raise the creator’s allowance, reset their usage, or fund their workspaces from a project budget.