Coder powers secure, scalable development across key industries — automotive, finance, government, and technology — enabling faster builds, tighter compliance, and seamless AI adoption in enterprise-grade cloud environments.
Quotas are a mechanism for controlling spend by associating costs with workspace
templates and assigning budgets to users. Users that exceed their budget will be
blocked from launching more workspaces until they either delete their other workspaces
or get their budget extended.
For example: A template is configured with a cost of 5 credits per day, and the user is
granted a budget of 15 credits per day. This budget limits the user to 3 concurrent workspaces.
Credits is the fundamental unit representing cost in the quota system. This integer
can be arbitrary, or it can map to your preferred currency.
Budget is the per-user, enforced, upper limit to credit spend.
Allowance is a grant of credits to the budget.
Establishing Costs
Templates describe their cost through the daily_cost attribute in
resource_metadata.
Since costs are associated with resources, an offline workspace may consume
less quota than an online workspace.
A common use case is separating costs for a persistent volume and ephemeral compute:
When the workspace above is shut down, the docker_container and
coder_metadata both get deleted. This reduces the cost from 30 credits to
10 credits.
Resources without a daily_cost value are considered to cost 0. If the cost
was removed on the docker_volume above, the template would consume 0 credits when
it's offline. This technique is good for incentivizing users to shut down their
unused workspaces and freeing up compute in the cluster.
Establishing Budgets
Each group has a configurable Quota Allowance. A user's budget is calculated as
the sum of their allowances.
For example:
Group Name
Quota Allowance
Frontend
10
Backend
20
Data
30
Username
Groups
Effective Budget
jill
Frontend, Backend
30
jack
Backend, Data
50
sam
Data
30
alex
Frontend
10
By default, groups are assumed to have a default allowance of 0.
Quota Enforcement
Coder enforces Quota on workspace start and stop operations. The workspace
build process dynamically calculates costs, so quota violation fails builds
as opposed to failing the build-triggering operation. For example, the Workspace
Create Form will never get held up by quota enforcement.