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Product May 12, 2026 7 min

Spend Controls: Stopping Runaway AI Costs Before They Happen

Hard caps, alerts, and prepaid wallets that keep AI spend predictable.

Spend Controls: Stopping Runaway AI Costs Before They Happen

The scariest line in an AI company’s P&L is inference cost you didn’t authorize. A buggy loop or an over-eager agent can burn a month of budget in an hour.

Spend controls move the check upstream. A hard cap per customer, team, or agent is enforced before a single token is consumed — so overdraft is structurally impossible.

Layer in prepaid wallets (burn-down, expiry) and real-time alerts, and you get predictable cost without slowing down legitimate usage.

Orvlin enforces these caps in under 10ms at the metering edge, so protection is instant and invisible to good traffic.

Frequently asked questions

How do I prevent runaway AI spend?

Enforce per-agent and per-customer hard caps before requests run, plus prepaid wallets. Orvlin does this in <10ms.

What are prepaid credits?

Pre-funded wallets that burn down as usage lands, with optional expiry — great for cash-flow and abuse control.

Want to learn more?

Book a demo and see Orvlin in action.

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