Usage Limits & Spending Controls

Why this matters

Without limits, a tenant could:

• Provision 10,000 extensions overnight (your wholesale charges spike before you can react)
• Run a fraudulent toll-fraud campaign through your platform (5-figure bills in hours)
• Forget about a runaway auto-dialer that burns through 100,000 minutes

Usage Limits put hard caps on each tenant. When they hit the cap, you get an alert. Optionally, the tenant gets auto-suspended.

This is the single most important defensive setting on the platform.

Where it lives

Top nav → Settings → Usage Limits (or the gear menu in some layouts).

The page shows every tenant in a table:

• Name
• Monthly Spend Limit ($)
• Max Extensions
• Max DIDs
• Max Monthly Minutes
• Alert Threshold (%)
• Auto-Suspend (Yes/No)
• Actions

Empty cells mean "no limit" for that tenant on that field.

What you can cap

Limit	What it counts	When it triggers
Monthly Spend	All charges from the start of the current billing cycle (DIDs, extensions, per-minute, fees)	When the cumulative billed amount hits the cap
Max Extensions	Provisioned extensions on the tenant	When they try to create the (N+1)th
Max DIDs	Assigned DIDs to the tenant	When you (or they via API) try to assign the (N+1)th
Max Monthly Minutes	Inbound + outbound call minutes since cycle start	When the cumulative minutes hit the cap

Alert Threshold — percentage of any cap that triggers an early-warning email. Default 80%. So if a cap is 1000 minutes and threshold is 80%, you get an email when the tenant hits 800.

Auto-Suspend — checkbox. If on, the tenant is suspended automatically when any cap is hit. Their tenant dashboard shows a billing-suspended page.

Setting limits on a tenant

Click Edit on a tenant row. The Edit Limits modal opens with all six fields. Set what you want; leave blank for unlimited. Click Save Limits.

Changes are immediate. If a tenant is currently over a cap you just set, they're not retroactively suspended — but they'll trip the suspension on their next charge or extension creation.

Recommended starting limits

For new tenants you don't fully trust yet (most cases):

• Monthly Spend — $500 (typical small business spend ceiling)
• Max Extensions — 50 (or 2x what they say they'll need)
• Max DIDs — 10
• Max Monthly Minutes — 5,000 (covers a reasonably busy small business)
• Alert Threshold — 80%
• Auto-Suspend — On

For trusted long-term tenants, raise the caps or remove them. Don't set caps so loose that they're meaningless — even your most trusted tenant can have a misconfigured auto-dialer.

What happens when a cap is hit

1. At threshold — you get an email: "Tenant ACME has hit 80% of their monthly minute cap." Forward this to your tenant or just keep it for awareness.
2. At cap — if Auto-Suspend is on:
   • Tenant status → SUSPENDED
   • Inbound calls → "service interrupted" message
   • Outbound calls → blocked at the SIP level
   • Tenant sees a billing-suspended page when they log in
   • You get an email
   • We don't email the tenant directly (you do, with whatever brand voice you want)

If Auto-Suspend is off, you just get the alert email and the tenant keeps running. You decide what to do.

Tenant Defaults

Settings → Tenants → Tenant Defaults includes default limit values. These pre-fill when you create new tenants. Set sensible defaults and you won't have to remember to set limits on every new tenant.

Reset to Defaults

The Edit Limits modal has a Reset to Defaults button. Restores the tenant to whatever you've configured in Tenant Defaults.

Tracking usage in real time

Usage isn't only visible on the Usage Limits page. Each tenant's dashboard shows their current cycle usage at the top. You can also see live aggregate usage on Reports → Tenant Invoices filtered to the current month.

If you need fine-grained per-day data, the Analytics page covers it.

Limits and white-label

Tenants don't see the limits you've set on them. They see a generic "service suspended" page when they trip the cap. If they ask why, you can:

• Tell them they hit a usage cap and offer to raise it
• Tell them their billing was past due (technically true — they exceeded their spend allowance)
• Use the audit log to see exactly what triggered

How you communicate this is part of your brand. Some partners keep limits invisible; some show them in the tenant dashboard via a custom integration.