Set a spending cap, and unattended work parks instead of running up a bill

The platform counted every token and enforced nothing, which is an odometer rather than a governor. The case that matters is not a run you are watching cost too much. It is a scheduled workflow that fails, retries and fails again through the night while nobody is looking.

Settings now takes a monthly cap for your workspace, for you, and for any individual workflow. Spend is a sum over a ledger with one row per completed piece of work, each naming the surface that ran it and whose money it was, with the dollar figure fixed at the moment it was written. A price change never rewrites a month you have already been measured against.

What happens when a cap is reached depends on who is watching. Unattended work parks: it keeps its place in the queue, records which budget stopped it and the date it wakes, and drains itself when the month rolls over or you raise the cap. Raising a cap wakes exactly what that cap parked, and anything still over the line parks again. Work you are standing in front of refuses with a message you can read, because a run that silently never starts is worse than a refusal.

Every number on the card is an estimate and the copy says so. Nothing is reserved, so a few jobs can pass the check at once, failed attempts still spend, and work already in flight always finishes. Browser minutes are measured without a price at all, and shown anyway: work the platform did for free is still work it did.

You also hear about it. A budget that stops something tells you once per scope per month, not once per parked job, because the runaway this exists for would otherwise park every few minutes for weeks.