Agent Budgets and Rate Limits: Stopping a Runaway Agent Before It Costs You
Permissions decide whether an individual action is allowed. They cannot see the same allowed action repeated four hundred times a minute. That is what budgets and rate limits are for.
Three kinds of limit
Rate limits cap requests per unit of time: for example 30 writes a minute. They catch loops.
Daily caps cap actions per period: for example 200 writes a day. They catch slow-burn problems.
Cost budgets cap spend where a platform meters inference or usage.
What AI PRO CRM does
AI PRO CRM does not run agents or call AI models, and has no budgets, credits or metering. It has a safety fence, never billed:
- A per-agent daily cap on successful writes: 100 on Free, 500 on Starter and Team, 2,000 on Business. The day follows the workspace time zone.
- MCP rate limits of 120 requests a minute per credential and 600 a minute per workspace.
- A REST API limit of 120 requests a minute per user.
When an agent hits a rate limit, the call is refused and recorded in the agent call ledger with the status rate_limited.
Sensible defaults if you set your own
For your own agent runner, a starting point might be:
| Agent role |
Writes per minute |
Writes per day |
| Read-only |
0 |
0 |
| Assistant |
20 |
200 |
| Operator |
30 |
500 |
These are illustrative, not AI PRO CRM settings. Cap reads too; an agent reading everything is an exfiltration risk.
What should happen at the limit
Do not silently drop actions. Return a structured error so the agent stops rather than retrying in a loop, and record the event. In your own runner, consider pausing the agent until a human looks.
Why per-agent, not only per-workspace
A workspace cap alone lets one misbehaving agent starve the others. Per-agent caps isolate the failure; a workspace ceiling is a backstop.
Tuning
Start conservative. After two weeks, raise limits for agents that hit them legitimately, and note why.
FAQ
Should caps reset at midnight or rolling?
Rolling windows suit bursty agents; daily resets are easier to reason about. AI PRO CRM's cap follows the workspace-time-zone day.
Can an owner raise their own agent's limit?
In AI PRO CRM the per-agent daily write cap is fixed by your plan and cannot be adjusted per agent; see pricing.