AI Agent Cost Overruns: Essential Guide to Avoid Risk
An agent decides its own workload, so it also decides its own bill: how many steps to take, how many tools to call and how much context to carry forward. This guide explains why agent spend behaves nothing like ordinary software spend, names the seven failure modes behind most overruns, shows how to model the unit economics of a single run before you build, and sets out the design-time and runtime guardrails that cap the damage – step and depth limits, tool budgets, duplicate-call breakers, per-run cost ceilings and kill switches – plus cost regression testing, the four signals worth paging on, and a fully worked invoice-agent example.
