Incidents/ By cause/ Retry loops/ cursor-638-6weeks
BLOCK Retry loops Cursor startup 2024

Founder spent $638 on Cursor AI coding in six weeks

A founder-CTO accumulated $638 in Cursor on-demand charges over about six weeks (later $928.45 over 70 days), driven by bursts of high-frequency requests and a premium thinking model.

Reported loss$638
Which rule would have stopped this?

An agent got stuck retrying a failing call, or entered a self-reinforcing loop. Each retry costs money. The fix is a velocity rule and a per-window cap. velocity + per-period total would have rejected or flagged this transaction before any money moved.

Daily / period total
A loop that's individually small but runs thousands of times overnight.
daily_max_usd: 200
Velocity limit
Infinite retry loops and credential-abuse bursts before the dollars pile up.
max_per_minute: 20

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What happened

A founder-CTO accumulated $638 in Cursor on-demand charges over about six weeks (later $928.45 over 70 days), driven by bursts of high-frequency requests and a premium thinking model.

The root cause was classified as Retry / infinite loop. An agent got stuck retrying a failing call, or entered a self-reinforcing loop. Each retry costs money. The fix is a velocity rule and a per-window 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.

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