Your monthly budget is a hard ceiling. When an account's month-to-date spend reaches it, Pace holds every campaign at $1 per campaign per day for the rest of the month. It's a fixed rule that runs independently from Pace's AI optimization engine, so even if a pacing decision misjudges a day, your account can't run past the number you set.
Pausing is opt-in. Pace won't pause anything at month end unless you've asked it to, on that account or on that campaign group.
Permissions required: Every plan gets account-level overspend protection, and every account starts on the $1-a-day option. You choose what happens under Account Settings. Group-level overrides need campaign groups (Pro plan and above) and a plan with Custom AI Guardrails.
Why it matters
- The ceiling sits on top of every pacing decision, so a misfire in the optimizer can't push you over budget.
- A monitor compares spend to your budget every five minutes across every connected platform, rather than only when a pacing run happens.
- Pace logs every pause and resume, and can send a Slack or email alert.
Choose what happens at your budget
Open Account Settings and find When the monthly budget is reached. A toggle beside the heading offers two answers:
- Keep running. Pace keeps the campaigns on, and holds each one at a small daily amount for the rest of the month.
- Pause. Pace pauses the account's active campaigns. Your budgets aren't touched, so nothing has to be put back afterwards.
Keeping them running is the default, at $1 per campaign per day, and an account nobody has ever opened this setting on behaves exactly that way. Switch the toggle to Pause if you'd rather the account stopped. That's the platform-native way to stop: your campaigns sit at Paused in the ad platform, which is the same state they'd be in if you paused them yourself.
The daily amount field only appears while Keep running is selected, so there's nothing extra to read past when you've chosen to pause. The small ? beside the heading sums up the choice and links back to this article.
If you name your own amount in place of the $1, Pace suggests a figure, roughly 20% of the account's average included-campaign daily budget, and shows what that comes to across the account each day. The lowest you can set is $1 per campaign per day. Very small budgets can slow down automated bidding, so pick a number you'd be comfortable running on.
This amount only ever applies once the monthly budget has been reached. For the rest of the month your campaigns are paced normally.
The amount is also capped, and the cap is an account total rather than a per-campaign allowance. Every included campaign gets the amount you name, so what Pace checks is what they add up to: together they can't spend more than half a normal day's budget. The month's money is already spent by then, and the point of keeping campaigns on is to keep them learning, not to buy a second budget a day at a time. With ten campaigns sharing a $3,000 month, a normal day is $100, half of that is $50, so the most you can set is $5 per campaign. If you set a campaign its own daily cap, that cap wins: Pace holds it there rather than lifting it to the trickle.
If an account has so many campaigns that its share works out under $1 each, the amount can't be honoured at all: $1 is the lowest daily budget Pace will write, and writing that to every campaign would cost several times the allowance. In that case Pace pauses the campaigns instead and puts them back on the 1st. This is the one time Pace pauses an account that didn't ask to be paused, and it's the safer of the two outcomes: the alternative is leaving the account running on its full budgets until the 1st.
One limit worth knowing. On a custom flight, Pace holds the campaigns at the lowest daily budget the platform allows (never below $1) rather than pausing them. The monitor that does the pausing works to calendar months and doesn't know about flights, so Pace writes the budgets down to that minimum instead and leaves them there for the rest of the flight. On platforms with a higher minimum of their own, LinkedIn and TikTok among them, the hold sits at that higher figure.
Pace never writes a daily budget below $1 on any platform, whatever the platform's own minimum allows. Where a platform's minimum is higher, that one applies instead.
If you had the old overspend checkbox unticked on an account, nothing changes for it: that account keeps running at $1 a day per campaign when it reaches its budget, the same as every account that has never been configured. Change it whenever you like under the account's Budget settings by picking one of the two options above.
What you see in the ad platform
This part applies to accounts set to pause. On the keep-running option nothing is paused: the campaigns stay live at your daily amount and the platform shows them as active throughout.
While an account is paused, its campaigns show as Paused in Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads, TikTok Ads, Reddit Ads, Amazon Ads, and X Ads. The daily budgets on those campaigns are exactly what they were.
Three things bring them back:
- The 1st of the month. Pace resumes everything it paused, in your workspace's timezone.
- A bigger budget. Raise the account's monthly budget and the next check, usually within five minutes, brings the campaigns back.
- Switching to the keep-running option. Pace resumes the campaigns on its next pass, and the next pacing run sets them to your daily amount.
Only campaigns Pace paused are resumed. Anything you paused yourself stays paused.
Note: Don't switch these campaigns back on yourself, or with another tool. Pace's next check will pause them again, and the campaign collects a pause and an unpause for nothing. Raise the budget or change the setting instead.
Campaign groups follow the account
If you use campaign groups, each group is also watched against its own budget. Groups inherit the account's choice, and the group settings screen says which one it's inheriting. Set a group to pause or to keep running only when you want it to behave differently from the rest of the account. A group set to pause pauses its own campaigns even when the account is on the keep-running option.
When a group reaches its budget, only that group's campaigns stop; the rest of the account keeps going. On LinkedIn Ads, Pace pauses at LinkedIn's own campaign-group level rather than individual campaigns, to match how LinkedIn organises its own interface.
Exclude this group from automated actions is a different setting and hasn't changed. It keeps Pace's optimizer away from the group; it has nothing to do with what happens at the budget.
When a group stops, Pace confirms every campaign with the ad platform before recording it as stopped. Any campaign it can't confirm goes on a short list and gets another attempt on a later sweep, at least 30 minutes after the last one. After three attempts, Pace stops retrying and sends a single alert naming the campaigns still running, so you can stop them yourself instead of finding out at month end. This applies on every platform.
A $0 budget pauses a group
Set a campaign group's monthly budget to $0 and Pace pauses that group's active campaigns, so nothing spends against a budget you've zeroed. It runs as the first phase of every pacing run, and fires straight away when a budget edit or a sheet import sets a group to $0. Give the group a real budget in a later month and Pace re-enables the campaigns it paused and resumes pacing them.
If someone turns one of those campaigns back on outside Pace, Pace leaves it running, won't pause it again that month, and sends a Budget override left in place alert so the decision is visible.
Budget Rollover (Pro plan and above) can produce the same situation without anyone typing a zero. If last month's overspend is larger than the whole of next month's target, the effective target for the new month lands at $0. Pace pauses that account's or group's included campaigns for the month, records it in the Changes tab, and sends a critical alert. The campaigns resume automatically as soon as the target is positive again, whether that comes from the following month's carry, an edit to the base target, or Reset carry.
Reaching the budget should be rare
Pace eases an account down as it gets close to its monthly budget. An account running ahead of pace normally gets some room to catch up on a single day, and that room shrinks as the remaining budget thins out, so the account arrives at the end of the month rather than hitting a wall part way through it. An account that's on pace or under it is paced exactly as before.
The stop is the backstop, not the plan.
How you know it fired
Pace records it in two places, every time:
- The Changes tab logs each pause and resume, attributed to Pace, along with an entry noting that the account reached its budget and Pace stopped setting budgets for the month.
- Optional Slack and email alerts fire the moment Pace pauses your campaigns, and again when it re-enables them. Each names the account, platform, campaigns affected, spend, and the monthly budget.
If a pause ever looks wrong, why did Pace change my budget? walks you through diagnosis.
The restart alert
On Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, Pace keeps an eye on campaigns it has switched back on. If one of them is live, has a daily budget, and still has no impressions two days later, you get a single alert naming it, with the status the platform itself is reporting, such as Limited by budget or Learning.
The alert means Pace's side is done: the campaign is enabled and funded. It doesn't mean something in Pace is broken, and it isn't an instruction to change anything. Most campaigns pick up on their own. Google asks for up to 7 days for a campaign to come back up to speed after a restart.
What a pause can cost you
Pausing is the cleanest way to stop, and it avoids the Limited by budget state that a tiny daily budget produces. It isn't a guarantee of an instant restart, and it's worth knowing why:
- Google Ads lists "new or reactivated bid strategy" among the changes that reset a bid strategy's learning period. A campaign that's been paused for a chunk of the month can come back into a learning period rather than straight back to its old performance.
- Meta Ads documents that an ad set paused for 7 days or more re-enters the learning phase when it restarts.
In practice most campaigns recover on their own within a few days. If one has still served nothing a week after restarting, opening the campaign and re-saving its bid strategy is the last thing to try. Do it once, then leave it alone for about 7 days, which is what Google asks for after a bid strategy change. Re-saving it repeatedly restarts the clock each time.
If you'd rather not take that risk on a particular account, that's what the keep-running option is for.
Limitations
- Daily Floor accounts are exempt. An account set to spend a fixed amount every day gets its own hard daily spend cap instead, so neither month-to-date protection nor $0 group enforcement applies to it. Accounts on a monthly budget, which is most of them, are fully covered.
- While an account or group is paused at its budget, you can't trigger a manual pacing run (Pace Now) on it. It unblocks once it's running again.
- A budget has to be set. Set your monthly budget first, because a group with no monthly budget is skipped rather than guessed at.
- The $1 floor is read in your account's own currency, so on a currency where $1 is a very small amount it's the platform's minimum that does the work.