Type: url
Original: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/3/default-hard-budget-caps/
Status: generated
Language: en
Summary
Simon Willison argues that pay-by-usage services and APIs need hard budget caps — limits that cut a service off and return errors once a spending threshold is reached, rather than soft caps that only send a warning — and that these should be on by default, with removing them an explicit opt-in. His reasoning is that coding agents and personal agents make it much easier to spin up code that incurs costs, so runaway bills become more likely; he welcomes the spend limits AWS and Google Cloud have recently introduced and suggests agents themselves could favour providers that offer hard caps.