The budget checks

The limits AdCopilot's server applies to anything that can start or raise spend — the comfortable daily budget (a warning), the monthly cap (a refusal), Maximize Clicks with no per-click cap (a refusal), and the campaign it built (yours to switch on).

Four tools can start or raise spend: create_campaign, create_performance_max_campaign, update_campaign and set_campaign_status. AdCopilot checks each call to them against the budget you saved, on its own server, before Google is called. These checks hold even if your AI client is set to always allow the tool.

The two numbers you save

Both are in the Business profile on the dashboard's Home page (the workspace owner edits it), or you can tell AdCopilot in the chat and it saves them.

Comfortable daily budget — the daily amount you said you are comfortable with. A preference.
Monthly cap — the most you want the campaigns in a Google Ads account to spend in a month, all together. A limit.

What refuses and what only warns

Situation	Result
Building a campaign when no business profile is saved	Refused — tell AdCopilot what you sell, where your customers are and your daily comfort, then build.
Building a campaign when no comfortable daily budget is saved	Refused — say the daily number, it saves it, then builds.
Switching on or re-bidding a campaign with no comfortable daily budget saved	Refused — same fix.
Switching on or re-bidding a campaign with no comfortable daily budget saved, when AdCopilot cannot read the campaign's daily budget from Google Ads	Refused — same fix; nothing was changed.
A daily budget above your comfortable daily budget	Goes through, with a warning.
A per-click cap higher than your whole comfortable daily budget	Goes through, with a warning.
Switching on a campaign, building one switched on, raising a budget, or giving a campaign that has ended a new end date, past your monthly cap — counting the campaigns already running in the account	Refused.
Any of those when AdCopilot cannot read the campaign's daily budget from Google Ads, while a monthly cap is saved	Refused — try again in a minute.
Maximize Clicks with no per-click cap	Refused.
Switching on the campaign AdCopilot built for you	Refused — that switch is yours, in Google Ads.
A budget, per-click cap or monthly cap it cannot read as a number, or a monthly cap of zero or below	Refused.

The comfort warning

Since v2.15.0, going above your comfortable daily budget is a heads-up, not a block. The change goes through and the reply says:

This campaign is set to spend $60/day — about $1,824 a month — above the comfortable daily budget on file, $40. That is a heads-up, not a block: the saved comfort stays $40 unless you ask me to change it.

Your saved comfort does not change unless you ask. When you ask for a number above it, the assistant passes your own words as over_comfort_ack, and they are recorded with the change and quoted back:

Recorded with this change: "yes, go to 60 a day for the sale week".

The monthly cap

The monthly cap is a limit you set, so it refuses. It is checked on every change that would start or raise spend: switching a campaign on, building a campaign switched on, raising a daily budget, and moving the start or end date of a campaign that is switched on but has ended, which starts it spending again. It counts the campaigns already running in that Google Ads account together, with a budget that several campaigns share counted once:

That would put this account's running campaigns at $250/day in total — $100 for this campaign plus $150 for the others — about $7,600 a month, above the monthly cap of $5,000 on file. Raise the cap first (tell me the number), pick a smaller daily budget, or pause another campaign.

When nothing else is running in the account, or AdCopilot cannot read the rest of it at that moment, it compares the one campaign on its own:

That would put this campaign at $200/day — about $6,080 a month — above the monthly cap of $5,000 on file. Raise the cap first (tell me the number), or pick a smaller daily budget.

The month is 30.4 days, so the daily budgets may add up to the cap divided by 30.4. A campaign built paused is checked when it is switched on. Raising the budget of a campaign that stays paused is compared on its own, because it spends nothing until it is switched on, unless that budget also pays for a campaign that is running. If AdCopilot cannot read the campaign's own daily budget from Google Ads at all, it does not guess: it refuses the change and asks you to try again in a minute. A monthly cap that is saved but is not a number above zero refuses every one of these changes until you give it one; leave Monthly cap blank for no cap. Changes made in Google Ads itself, outside AdCopilot, are not checked.

Maximize Clicks with no per-click cap

Maximize Clicks with no maximum cost per click lets Google pay any amount for a single click. AdCopilot refuses it and asks for the most you want to pay for one click, then switches with that cap.

The campaign it built

A campaign AdCopilot builds with you is created paused, and AdCopilot will not switch it on. You do that in Google Ads: Campaigns → the campaign → the grey Paused dot → Enabled.

Who these checks apply to

The monthly cap applies to every workspace that saves one. It is a limit you set, so it holds whatever the Business profile's How much you already know says, I do this for a living included, and however long the workspace has been running its own campaigns.

The comfortable-daily-budget checks, the per-click-cap checks and the "nothing saved yet" refusals apply to workspaces going through AdCopilot's guided start. They are off when How much you already know is set to I do this for a living, and for workspaces that were running their own campaigns before the guided start existed. The no-delete rule and the campaign-it-built rule apply to everyone.

See Money-fence refusals and warnings for what to do about each message.