Spend Ceiling

A ceiling is only meaningful if what happens at the limit is specified. Systems that stop serving requests protect the budget and damage trust; systems that log an overage and continue protect the user and lose the control. The workable pattern is usually graduated — warn, degrade to cached or local responses, then stop — with the degradation step being where most of the value sits, because it keeps the service available while removing the marginal cost. Ceilings also need a reset period and an escalation route, or they become a support queue.

Spend governance in Centralpoint operates at the prompt-rule layer, where budgets and answer caching combine: an approaching ceiling can be met by serving governed cached answers from the local index rather than by refusing to answer. Usage is visible per skill and per execution, so a ceiling can be set against evidence rather than against a guess.