Usage & cost

Every paid turn is metered per house and stamped with whose key paid it: worker (arbe’s key — the included alpha budget) or house/env (a provider key you added under house secrets — your bill, never capped by us). Both sides of that split, plus 30-day breakdowns by capability, model, and thread, are at /houses/<id>/usage in the web app.

houses.spend_cap_usd is a lifetime cap on arbe-funded spend only, defaulting to $5 for new houses. Only arbe can change it — the column is not in the authenticated update grants and no API or CLI exposes it — so email oskar@rough.dk for a raise. It does not renew.

Once the cap is used up, worker-key seams refuse rather than dispatch stopping wholesale: a bot reply or ambient speaker decision is skipped with reason: 'budget_exceeded' (visible in arbe thread trace), and worker-key tools return a refusal saying the included budget is gone. The escape hatch is your own key — add OPENROUTER_API_KEY under house secrets and LLM turns run uncapped on it. A few seams (parts of sandbox) always use arbe keys and stay paused until the cap is raised.