Overspend protection is a hard spending ceiling that pauses your campaigns before month-to-date spend runs past your budget. It's a fixed rule, not a judgement call, and it runs independently from Pace's AI optimization engine. So even if a pacing decision misjudges a day, your account can't blow past the number you set.
This is the safety net that makes automated pacing trustworthy. The AI steers your spend day to day; overspend protection is the ceiling neither the AI nor a runaway campaign can cross.
Permissions required: Account-level overspend protection is available on every Pace plan — switch it on under Account Settings. Group-level protection needs campaign groups (Pro plan and above), and its automatic pause-at-cap option is part of Custom AI Guardrails on the One plan and above.
Why it matters
- It's a fixed rule, not AI. The ceiling sits on top of every pacing decision, so a misfire in the optimizer can't push you over budget.
- It checks constantly. A dedicated monitor compares spend to your cap every five minutes across every connected platform, not just when a scheduled pacing run happens.
- It's transparent. Pace logs every pause and resume and can send a Slack or email alert, so you always know what happened and why.
How it works
Your cap is your monthly budget plus a small tolerance buffer — your Acceptable Variance, such as 2% or 5%. A $10,000 budget with 5% variance gives a $10,500 cap. When month-to-date spend reaches that cap, Pace pauses the account's active campaigns across Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads, and TikTok Ads.
When spend drops back under the cap — say, after you raise your budget — Pace re-enables only the campaigns it paused. Campaigns you paused yourself stay paused. On the 1st of each month, in your workspace's own timezone, Pace resumes anything the guardrail paused, so every month starts clean.
Account level and group level
Overspend protection guards two levels of budget. At the account level, it watches your whole monthly budget across every connected platform.
If you use campaign groups — smaller budgets that sit inside an account — Pace watches each group against its own cap too. When a group's spend crosses its cap, only that group's campaigns pause; the rest of the account keeps running. On LinkedIn Ads, Pace pauses at LinkedIn's own campaign-group level rather than individual campaigns, to match how LinkedIn organises its own interface.
See how budgets and pacing fit together for how the account envelope and groups relate.
How you know it fired
Two places, every time:
- The Changes tab logs each pause and resume, attributed to Pace. For example, "3 campaigns paused — spend ($10,540) exceeded budget cap ($10,500)."
- 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 cap that was crossed.
If a pause ever looks wrong, why did Pace change my budget? walks you through diagnosis.
Limitations
Overspend protection guards your monthly budget, so a few boundaries apply:
- Daily Floor accounts are exempt. If you've set an account to spend a fixed amount every day — a Daily Floor — instead of a monthly budget, month-to-date overspend protection doesn't apply. Pausing it mid-month would break the daily minimum you committed to, so a Daily Floor account gets a different guardrail instead: its own hard daily spend cap. Accounts on a monthly budget, which is most of them, are fully covered.
- Manual runs are blocked. While an account is overspend-paused, you can't trigger a manual pacing run (Pace Now), so a manual pass can't push spend back up during a blowout. It unblocks once spend drops under the cap.
- A budget has to be set. The cap is only as good as the number behind it — set your monthly budget first.