# Spend and caps

> How Guv bills in pounds, per second of actual use, and how hard spend caps stop surprise bills.

Guv bills in pounds sterling. Your plan includes some usage each month, and anything beyond that is charged per second on what your services actually use. Builds are free. See [pricing](/pricing/) for the current rates, and use the calculator there to estimate a bill.

## What is measured

| Resource | How it is measured |
| --- | --- |
| CPU | vCPU-seconds actually used. A service that idles at 2% of a vCPU pays for 2%. |
| Memory | Your working set, sampled every 10 seconds. Cache the kernel can drop is not counted. |
| Disk | Space used on each volume, sampled hourly and averaged over the month. |
| Outbound data | Bytes leaving the platform. 100 GB a month is included. |

## Caps

Every workspace has a monthly **spend cap** from the moment it is created: £10 on Hobby and £50 on Pro. You can change it, but Guv never raises it for you, and an agent can never raise it at all.

- At **50%** and **80%** you get an email, a banner in the dashboard and a webhook.
- At **100%**, the `on_cap` action runs. The default, `sleep-non-production`, puts staging and preview environments to sleep and keeps production serving.

You can set the cap and its behaviour in `guv.yaml`:

```yaml
spend:
  monthly_cap: 400GBP
  on_cap: sleep-non-production   # or pause-all, or notify-only
  warn_at: [50, 80]
```

`notify-only` never pauses anything. Because that removes the protection, it needs a payment method on file and `acknowledge_no_pause: true`.

## Forecasts

The dashboard and `guv spend --forecast` project your month-end bill from your usage so far, with a short explanation for each service, such as *"api used 0.3 vCPU on average"*.

## Agent budgets

Agent tokens have their own daily budget for how much they may increase spend. A change that would go over it returns [`agent_budget_exceeded`](/errors/agent_budget_exceeded/) and asks a human.

## VAT

Prices are shown without VAT for businesses and with VAT for consumers. Invoices are VAT-correct. Guv uses Stripe to take payments.