How to detect a runaway AI agent before it burns your budget

Run runaway-spend detection from the dashboard to check every agent and workflow against its own recent baseline. A spend pattern well outside that baseline is raised as an alert and delivered to a Slack or Discord webhook, or any custom webhook you configure.

How Spendline does this

Every call is logged as it happens, so a spend baseline per agent or workflow is always current. Detection itself runs on demand, triggered from the dashboard, rather than on a fixed schedule; a new alert is only written after it is durably saved, so nothing gets announced that the ledger has no record of. Delivery goes out over whichever webhook you have configured, Slack, Discord, or a generic endpoint. Separately, where the hourly burn-rate check is switched on for an account, it reads every hierarchical budget, at any scope including one tied to a single agent or team, and warns before that budget is on track to run out, regardless of its strict_mode setting; a legacy account-wide budget is outside what it reads. The other lane stays org-only: the threshold alert evaluated synchronously on each proxied call only resolves an org-level or legacy account-wide budget, so that specific alert never fires for one scoped to a single agent.

Why it matters

A hard budget cap is the last line of defense, not the first. Running detection regularly, and reviewing what it turns up, is what turns a budget cap from "the way we found out" into "the safety net we never needed."

Frequently asked questions