Save money with AI, not on security

"How do you keep an autonomous agent from burning your budget?" is the first question anyone asks. The answer on the control plane has three parts: route cheap by default, bound every loop, and make the bill impossible to ignore.

1. Cheap by default, deep on demand

When a task arrives, the plane classifies it before any model is called. Short single-action commands ("check disk space", "open Safari") are simple — few steps, low temperature, no verification pass. Multi-step or ambiguous tasks ("compare the best providers", "debug and fix this") are complex — deeper budget, verification enabled. Between the two, standard.

simple   → 3 steps · no verify · cheap model
standard → 8 steps · verify   · balanced
complex  → 14 steps · verify  · deep model

Provider preference follows the same logic: complex tasks rank quality providers (Anthropic, OpenAI) first; simple tasks rank cheap ones (DeepSeek, Google). The plan caps the ceiling — free accounts get 8 steps per task, Pro 16 — so a runaway loop can't blow the day's budget.

2. Bounded loops

Every run records steps, tokens and cost as it happens. The owner's brain config (mode, max steps, temperature, extra rules, verification on/off) is pushed to the device with the task queue — the agent tunes itself per owner without extra API calls. Daily run caps and per-write rate limits back this up at the account level.

3. Honest accounting

Cost is price-mapped per model family (exact model → exact price; unknown models are flagged as estimates, never silently under-counted). Anthropic cache reads/writes get their real multipliers. The Insights view shows per-day tokens and spend, by provider, by model, by agent — and the Deep Dive trace shows the cost of every step.

The security half of the sentence

Saving money means nothing if the vault leaks. The same plane that meters your spend also guards it: keys encrypted at rest, no keys on devices, 2FA on sensitive actions, scope-isolated device tokens. Cheap routing, bounded loops, honest accounting — and a lock on the door. That's the whole pitch.