Simon Willison: pay-by-usage services need default hard budget caps in the agent era
Simon Willison · rss · 2026-10-04
Simon Willison argues pay-by-usage services and APIs should default to hard monthly budget caps — cut off with errors past $X/month, not just warning emails — with going uncapped as an explicit opt-in. Coding and personal agents drastically lower the friction of spinning up code that spends money, and nobody wants a surprise $10,000+ bill. He notes AWS quietly launched monthly spend limits on Sept 16 (currently limited rollout) and Google Cloud shipped Spend Caps in July, calling it a growing trend; he'd like agents to bias toward recommending capped providers.
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