How do I give a team one shared AI budget?
Spend groups are named sets of people, by email, that one budget caps together. Manage them in the app or push them from Okta or Entra ID over SCIM. Growth plan.
A department tag works when every call carries it. A spend group works from the person instead: list the people on a team once, and every call any of them makes counts against one shared budget, whatever feature or key it came from.
Create a group
On Budgets → Spend groups, choose New group, name it and paste the members' emails (one per line or comma-separated). Then create a budget with scope Spend group and pick the group. Changes to a group apply to its budgets at once.
Make calls count for a person
Send the person's work email as X-Cost-User:
With JWT authentication, the token's user claim fills X-Cost-User automatically. Matching ignores case and surrounding spaces.
Elsewhere we recommend an internal id rather than an email for X-Cost-User, because it usually identifies your end users. Spend groups are for your own staff, so their work email is the right value here.
Groups from your identity provider
On the Business plan, connect SCIM and assign groups to the Cognocient AI app. A group named developer, finance or viewer sets that role; any other group becomes a spend group, marked SCIM in the app and read-only there. Creating, renaming, changing members or deleting the group in the IdP applies at once. Members are SCIM users of this account, so a person must be assigned to the app to be counted.
Limits
Up to 200 groups and 5,000 members per group. A group used by a budget can't be deleted until the budget is changed or removed.
Related articles
Budget Enforcement
Hard limits enforced at the proxy before charges reach your card.
Alerts: Email & Slack
Budget-threshold and anomaly alerts by email (every plan) and Slack (Base+): defaults, recipients, quiet hours, hourly cap.
CI Cost Gate
Fail a CI build when a change makes your AI calls more expensive than the baseline. Base plan.