AI budgets
See what AI steps cost, set a monthly cap and a daily cap per macro, and write macros that stop or take a cheaper path when the budget is gone.
Macros that call a cloud model cost money, and a macro that runs on a trigger can run a lot. Switchboard keeps count and can stop before the bill grows.
What is counted #
Every model step that uses your Anthropic key or your Switchboard plan saves what it cost, to a fraction of a cent, on its row in the run's trace. A run that cost more than 1¢ shows the total in Activity. Make with AI and Fix with AI count toward the month too.
Prices are known for Claude models only. A call to another provider (OpenAI, Gemini, an OpenAI-compatible server) is recorded with its tokens but counts as 0¢, so monthly and daily caps do not stop it. Watch those providers' own dashboards.
Steps that run on this Mac with Apple Intelligence cost nothing, are never counted and are never stopped.
Caps #
Monthly cap. In Settings > AI, under Spending. Empty means no cap.
Daily cap for one macro. In the macro's inspector, under Run, the AI daily cap field.
When a cloud step would go past either, it fails before calling the model, with "AI budget reached: $4.80 of $5.00 today for this macro". The run follows its normal error path, so a step set to Continue or to a branch can carry on without the model.
Settings > AI also lists this month's spending by macro, biggest first.
In your own macros #
Use the AI spending condition (ai.spent) as an Only if to stop a macro once the budget is gone, or in an If to take a cheaper path. The aiSpent("today") function gives the amount in dollars for any expression:
aiSpent("month", "this")0