A budget lease is a small amount of a fleet's budget, $1 by default with a 10-minute expiry, that Heighliner's model and tool gateways spend from locally.
The budget itself is an append-only ledger. When a lease runs low, the gateway takes a new one; unspent money returns when a lease closes or expires. Because calls spend from the lease instead of asking the ledger each time, the hot path never waits on a database, and the worst overrun is one lease.
When the budget is used up, no lease is granted. The next call returns budget_exhausted with a fix, and agents pause until the cap is raised. They are never deleted.
Related
- Why agents need a budget, not a dashboardA dashboard tells you what an agent spent after the fact. A budget stops it before it overspends. How dollar caps and leases make agents safe to leave running.
- FleetA fleet is one or more AI agents running one harness under one manifest, one budget and one policy. A single scheduled agent is a fleet of one.
- PricingHeighliner early access pricing: Free, Pro $20 and Team $200 with usage credit, per-second usage, model tokens on your own key, plus BYOC and self-hosted.