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

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 behardlimits. Soft caps, “after $X/month, send me a warning email”, will not cut it. Coding agents, and personal agents (coding agents wrapped in a less threatening UI), greatly reduce the friction of spinning up code that can do useful things. Sometimes those things cost money—calls to paid APIs, or hosted…

Simon Willison