Devin adds hierarchical budgets: AI spending limits across the company tree

If you have ever been responsible for the AI tools bill at a company with hundreds of developers, you know the problem: a single shared limit is too blunt, while manually configuring quotas for every person becomes a job of its own. Windsurf is offering a solution for Devin Enterprise: hierarchical budgets that mirror the company's organizational structure.

How it works

At the root of the hierarchy is a single account budget. Beneath it, child budgets can be created up to three levels deep. One budget can cover one or more organizations, but each organization belongs to exactly one budget.

A budget has several parameters. There is an ACU limit for the monthly window, which caps both the budget itself and everything beneath it. There is also an optional temporary limit that remains in effect until the end of the current window; a parent budget whose administrator controls the limit; custom user limits, including tiers and individual exceptions; and a dedicated list of people who can spend, change child-budget limits, and delegate permissions further.

Example: departments with delegated control

In the blog's example, the fictional company Acme has 10 departments. Alice from Central IT sets an overall limit for each department. Bob leads Engineering and manages everything under that budget himself: he creates child budgets, sets limits, and configures user tiers.

Ahead of a product launch, Bob gives the Payments team a temporary additional 5,000 ACU, raising its limit from 10,000 to 15,000 for the current window. However, all engineering teams combined still remain subject to Engineering's 30,000 ACU ceiling. If the entire department needs more, Bob sends a request to Alice. He cannot see other departments' budgets, as permissions are granted granularly.

The main benefit here is organizational. Requests for higher limits go to the nearest manager who understands the context, rather than to the central IT team.

Example: a separate pool for a sprint

The second scenario is more relevant to teams running many agents in parallel. Each Acme developer has a monthly quota, such as 200 ACU in the Developer tools budget. A separate Security hardening budget of 5,000 ACU is created for a security initiative, with a more generous tier and approvals based on effectiveness.

Developer Carol has access to both budgets: 200 ACU for day-to-day work and 1,000 ACU from the project pool. Spending from the project budget can be attributed directly to the project's outcome and evaluated for effectiveness. The entire initiative is capped at 5,000 ACU, so a swarm of Devin sessions searching for vulnerabilities cannot consume everyone else's budget.

Limitations and what to do about them

The feature is available only on the Devin Enterprise plan. It can be enabled under Enterprise Settings, then Usage Policies, then Budgets. This is a vendor blog: it describes the convenience but provides no data on actual savings. The hierarchy is also limited to three levels, while limits are measured in ACU, Devin's internal unit, leaving the conversion into monetary terms up to you.

There are several practical takeaways for companies deploying agents. First, separate day-to-day and project budgets: that makes it easier to determine whether a specific initiative pays off. Second, delegate limit management to department heads instead of keeping everything under a single administrator. Third, make temporary increases a standard mechanism for release weeks rather than allowing baseline quotas to grow indefinitely. Even if you do not use Devin, the same model works for any usage-based AI tools: an overall ceiling, departments, projects, and people.