We’re going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

I read this article with a smile as over the last few months I've added this as a feature to nearly every agentic workload that I run.

Here’s a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps. I’m talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say “after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors”. These need to be hard limits. Soft caps, “after $X/month, send me a warning email”, will not cut it.

By the way you can do this with the agentic loop having awareness. One of the agent projects I've been working on gets a hard monthly spend limit. From that limit it derives a budget and determines each day how it is pacing to that budget. So, not only can you make these systems cost-controlled but you can hand over part of the challenge of managing that to the system itself.

We definitely need this on the low end of the market for small and personal projects, however it is just as badly needed at the enterprise side. I can't tell you how many vendors I've seen that move to credit models and they rather conveniently have no way to allow you to hard-cap the spend. This forces you as the customer to have to keep track or end up on the wrong side of a negotiation after you've burned through credits.