Knob

Budget cap

You might say: spend limit, token budget, cost cap

A hard limit on model spend for an organization or a project. When spend reaches it, the provider refuses new requests until someone raises or removes the limit or the next monthly cycle resets it, so a runaway loop stops instead of running up a bill. Set it low while you learn what a run costs, and raise it with evidence.

What it does
Puts a ceiling on what a flood of triggers or a looping run can cost.
Ask
What happens to runs in flight when the cap is hit, and who may raise it?
Typical
From a small project cap while learning to a large daily budget. StrongDM argues that a mature factory should spend at least $1,000 of tokens per engineer each day.
Trouble
The cap is hit mid-run and leaves half-finished work, or there is no cap and a loop runs all night.

What to look for

  1. A hard spend limit in the model provider's project settings
  2. A cost figure for each run on the run page
  3. Runs that fail with a spend-limit error

Connections

Sources

  1. OpenAI, Spend limits, Spend limitsTo stop traffic after tracked spend reaches a configured amount, enforce a hard spend limit for your organization or an individual project.
  2. OpenAI, Spend limits, Spend limitsHard spend limits can interrupt production traffic.
  3. OpenAI, Spend limits, Spend limitsReaching a project hard limit returns a 429 error … Raising or removing the reached limit allows traffic to resume after the update propagates. Otherwise, the limit resets with the next monthly cycle.
  4. Justin McCarthy (StrongDM), Software Factories And The Agentic Moment, Software Factories And The Agentic MomentIf you haven’t spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement
  5. Kent C. Dodds, You Own the Outcome: Product Engineering in the Age of AI, Watch the outcomesKnow your metrics and unit economics. "It works" isn't the bar. Does it work at a cost that makes sense?

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Budget cap" (budget-cap) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/software-factory/ against my project

Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.

An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal