Opaque per-token pricing triggered billing shock
Developers reported billing shock from high token burn rates and opaque pay-as-you-go pricing on coding agents, with several exceeding expected daily budgets by an order of magnitude.
An agent ran without supervision while the operator was asleep or away, accumulating charges for hours. The fix is a time-of-day rule and a hard daily cap. time-of-day + daily total would have rejected or flagged this transaction before any money moved.
max_amount_usd: 500
daily_max_usd: 200
category: compute, daily_max_usd: 50
block_after: "22:00", block_before: "07:00"
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What happened
Developers reported billing shock from high token burn rates and opaque pay-as-you-go pricing on coding agents, with several exceeding expected daily budgets by an order of magnitude.
The root cause was classified as Unattended / overnight session. An agent ran without supervision while the operator was asleep or away, accumulating charges for hours. The fix is a time-of-day rule and a hard daily cap.
This is one of 14 documented incidents in the open registry. Every entry is sourced to a public URL; amounts and dates are as reported by the source.