If your agent can’t be stopped by a hard spend ceiling, it isn’t…

If your agent can’t be stopped by a hard spend ceiling, it isn’t production-ready. For long-running agents, prioritize hard budget caps on pay-by-usage APIs and cloud projects so runaway runs become bounded failures instead of surprise bills or availability incidents. Make hard caps the default, require explicit opt-in to remove them, and treat budget limits as a release gate rather than optional telemetry.