Budget governance
Per-tenant budgets for GenAI: protect margin
Workspace budgets are not enough in multi-tenant products. Tenant-level controls protect shared margin and improve escalation ownership.
Full guide: Per-tenant LLM margin operating model for AI SaaS
Why tenant budgets are required
- One high-volume tenant can consume most of shared monthly budget.
- Workspace-level limits hide responsibility and delay escalation.
- Tenant-level controls align spend ownership with account teams.
Concentration math (the margin-drain signal)
Most “surprise” overruns are concentration problems: one tenant’s volume or token usage changes faster than the rest of the workspace.
Track tenant share of spend and tenant spend delta. A small number of tenants often drive most of the variance.
- tenantShare = tenantSpend / workspaceSpend
- tenantDelta = tenantSpend(today) - tenantSpend(baseline)
- Alert when one tenantShare crosses a threshold (example: 20-40%).
Implementation checklist
- Define daily and monthly tenant thresholds.
- Alert on warning and exceeded states with tenant context.
- Attach endpoint and promptVersion contributors in alert payloads.
- Review overrun tenants weekly with product and finance owners.
Tenant budget policy template (warning vs exceeded)
- Warning: notify account owner + platform owner with top endpointTag and promptVersion drivers.
- Exceeded: require an explicit decision (approve overrun, degrade, or throttle).
- Burn-rate: detect drift early (spend/day and cost/request vs baseline).
Recovery actions when a tenant exceeds budget
- Throttle the tenant on non-critical endpoints first.
- Route to cheaper models or smaller context for the exceeded tenant.
- Enforce per-tenant output caps to prevent runaway completions.
- Notify account owner with the top endpointTag + promptVersion drivers.
- Offer an upgrade path or quota policy instead of silent margin loss.
Pricing actions enabled by per-tenant budgets
- Introduce fair-use limits for high-variance tenants.
- Add usage-based overages for expensive endpoints (endpointTag-based pricing).
- Bundle low-cost features and charge for high-cost workflows explicitly.
- Use plan tiers to control access to high-cost endpoints and model tiers.
Weekly review agenda (15 minutes)
- Top 10 tenants by spend and by delta vs last week.
- Top endpoints for the top 3 tenants (feature drivers).
- promptVersion changes shipped in the same window.
- Retry ratio and outliers (p95/p99 token spikes).
- One action owner + one policy update.
What to alert on
- cost/request drift by endpointTag or promptVersion
- unexpected tenant concentration in Top Users
- request burst with falling success ratio
- budget warning, spend-alert, and exceeded state transitions
Execution checklist
- Confirm spike type: volume, token, deploy, or abuse signal.
- Assign one incident owner and one communication channel.
- Apply immediate containment before deep optimization.
- Document the dominant endpoint, tenant, and promptVersion driver.
- Convert findings into one permanent guardrail update.
FAQ
Should we set per-tenant budgets or per-user budgets?
If you are B2B, per-tenant budgets usually map directly to contracts and margin. Per-user budgets help for abuse detection and internal chargeback, but tenant budgets are the fastest path to commercial decisions.
Do per-tenant budgets mean hard blocking tenants?
Not necessarily. Start with soft thresholds (alerts + owner workflows). Add degraded mode (smaller context, shorter outputs, fewer tools) before hard blocks. Hard blocks work best for non-critical endpoints and abuse patterns.
What should the alert include for a tenant overrun?
Budget state + burn-rate, top endpointTag contributors, promptVersion changes in the same window, retry ratio, and the tenant’s share of workspace spend so the decision is fast and explainable.
Related guides
Evaluation resources
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