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AI agent cost control: token budgets, spend caps, and stopping runaway loops

Control what an AI agent costs with token budgets, daily spend caps, and loop limits. See spend per agent, per day, and per provider.

Updated 2026-08-22Reading time 5 min

The runaway loop is the real bill

An agent that retries a failing tool call ten times has just spent ten times your intended budget, often overnight. The fix is not to monitor harder — it is to put a hard limit in front of the loop.

Three levers that work

  • Token budgets — a ceiling per task or per day.
  • Step budgets — a maximum number of plan-act-reflect cycles.
  • Spend caps — a dollar amount the agent cannot exceed.

Where to see it

The dashboard shows spend per agent, per day, and per model. Blocked prompt-injection attempts are counted separately, because those are calls you never paid for.

Set it up in a minute

  1. Open Settings and set a default daily cap.
  2. Give each agent a per-run token budget.
  3. Turn on the loop limit so a stuck task stops itself.
  4. Check the spend tile at the end of the day.

Cheapest key that fits

The platform can route each task to the cheapest provider key that still fits the job. A quick file listing does not need your most expensive model — and now it will not use it.