How to use the Error budget policy template

Start a board from it
Use this template opens a new Freero board with the Error budget policy template on it (sign up free first). On a board you already have, open Templates in the toolbar and search for “Error budget policy”.
Follow the instruction on the board
“Write it with product and engineering leads together, while nothing is on fire. Sign it off, then follow it the first time the budget runs low.”
Fill in each part
- Plenty left More than half of this month’s budget left. What is normal?
- Burning fast Over a quarter spent in a week. What changes?
- Nearly gone Under 10% left. Who decides what ships?
- Spent Budget used up. How do we get back?
- Exceptions When may we break these rules, and who says so?
Bring your team and your agents
Invite people to the board or share a link, and work on it together live. The timer is in the top bar, private mode and voting in the board menu, and Claude or ChatGPT can join through Freero’s MCP server.

Work on it with an AI agent

Connect an assistant once and it works on the board with you, with your permissions: by default it reads and proposes, and people decide.

You ask: “Fill in the Error budget policy board from these notes.”
What happens It reads the board, then proposes sticky notes for it. Nothing changes until someone on the board accepts them.
You ask: “Group what we wrote into themes and list the actions.”
What happens It proposes clusters with a title each and task cards for the actions, labelled with its name and yours.

Service level objectives
Agree reliability targets from the user’s side: the journeys that matter, how to measure them, the target and what happens when you miss.
Game day plan
Plan a practice failure in a safe window: what you break, what you expect to happen, how you stop it and what you learn.
Postmortem action tracker
Follow the fixes agreed in incident reviews through to done, so the same failure doesn’t come back next quarter.
On-call handover
Hand the pager over cleanly: what happened this week, what’s still open, what to watch and what the next person needs to know.
Service runbook
What an on-call engineer needs at 3am for one service: how to tell it’s broken, first checks, safe fixes and who to wake.
Toil inventory
List the manual, repetitive work that keeps an operations team busy, measure what it costs each month and pick what to automate.