Credits and limits
What a run started from Claude Code costs, why a Simulation asks twice, and what stops an agent from spending your balance.
Claude Code spends from the same balance and the same included allowances as the website. It is a way in, not a separate plan, and nothing costs more because it came from there.
Quality Check
If your included allowance covers the run, it starts immediately and costs nothing extra. When the allowance is exhausted, the run moves to credits at the usual price, and Claude Code has to confirm that explicitly before it starts. It never crosses into credits quietly.
Simulation
A Simulation always costs credits, so it takes two steps.
Claude Code first asks for a quote: the exact price for that document revision and that persona, valid for five minutes. A quote reserves nothing and charges nothing. Starting the run is a second, separate action — and because it spends, the client asks you to approve it.
That split exists because a quote is cheap to get wrong and a run is not. It also means you see the price attached to the exact draft being read, rather than a number in the abstract.
The spend window
Underneath the per-run confirmation there is a second bound, and it is the one most worth understanding.
Confirming a run answers "did I mean this one". It does not answer "how much may this connection spend today". A person clicking Simulate has a hand, and nobody clicks four hundred times by accident. An agent has no hand — it can quote and confirm in a loop where every single confirmation is legitimate, and your balance still drains.
So your organisation has a ceiling on how much can be spent through Claude Code in a window. Cross it and the next run is refused, even with a valid, correctly confirmed quote. The refusal names the limit and when it resets, because the balance alone will not explain it — the ceiling counts what has been committed, not what has settled, so you can be refused while still holding credits.
It is one ceiling for the whole organisation. Everyone who has connected draws from it, it does not reset when someone reconnects, and it never applies to work you start in the browser.
Ask Claude Code for your workspace context to see how much room is left before planning a batch.