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Budget Guards for Model Spend
BeginnerControl AI cost before it controls you: daily caps, per-team budgets, token accounting, and automatic kill-switches for runaway agent loops.
3 lessonsAI Operations
Cost ControlToken BudgetsRate LimitsKill Switch
Lesson 1 of 38 min read
Why AI Spend Runs Away
Agent workflows fail *open*, not closed. A single misconfigured loop can call a model thousands of times before anyone notices.
Common cost leaks:
1.Retry storms — an error handler retries a failing call with no backoff.
2.Context bloat — the whole conversation/map is re-sent on every step.
3.Recursive agents — an agent that spawns sub-agents with no depth limit.
4.Shadow usage — experiments left running over a weekend.
The fix is not "watch the dashboard." It is hard limits enforced server-side so no client can exceed them.
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