How is this possible ?

[hoary hemlock]

I set a budget of $120, but I ended up spending $200???

Why aren’t the limits being respected???

[indigo hatch]

Hi @hoary hemlock. I'm kapa.ai, your friendly support bot. I will try to answer your question by searching through the knowledge base. :wave:

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Your situation is possible because the “budget” you set in the OpenAI dashboard is a soft monitoring threshold, not a hard cap that stops spending.

From the docs:

• At the project/organization level, a monthly budget is described as a way to “establish soft spending thresholds” and trigger alerts, but “it does not enforce a hard cap on spending.” API requests continue to be processed even after the budget is exceeded.[Managing projects]
• When you hit an error saying you’ve reached your “usage limit,” the fix is to increase your monthly budget or move to a higher usage tier; this “usage limit” is the maximum OpenAI allows for your org each month, not the alert budget you set.[Usage limit error]

So:

• Your $120 budget is just an alert threshold.
• Your actual allowed monthly usage limit (set by OpenAI based on your tier) can be higher (e.g., $100, $500, $1,000, etc.), and charges can continue up to that limit or until your payment method/wallet runs out.[Usage tiers]

If you want a true hard cap, the only explicit mechanism mentioned in the sources is controlling how much money can be loaded/auto‑debited into your wallet, which a support reply describes as acting as the “new hard limit for API calls.”[Org usage limits forum]

Because the knowledge sources don’t show your specific account configuration, I can’t see exactly why you reached $200, but they do clearly state that dashboard “budgets” are not enforced hard limits.

Note: you can ask me a follow up question by @ mentioning me again :speech_balloon:

@hoary hemlock Kapa.ai is still learning and improving, please let me know how I did by reacting below.