How are people handling paid external APIs for autonomous agents?

1 pointby ArielBarack12 days ago2 comments

storystarling12 days ago
I built a similar internal ledger for my print-on-demand setup because the image generation costs were eating all the margin.
The architecture that finally worked was treating every agent action as a transaction against a Redis counter. We use Celery for the heavy lifting, but the worker has to acquire a lock and deduct credits atomically from Redis before it can even call the external provider. If the balance hits zero, the task fails immediately. It adds a bit of latency but it’s the only way I found to prevent a runaway loop from draining the credit card.
- ArielBarack9 days ago
  This is super helpful — thank you. Two questions:
  Did you keep “credits” purely internal, or do you reconcile them back to real invoices/costs per provider?
  Any edge cases you hit around retries/idempotency (e.g., task retries after deduct, provider call succeeds but worker crashes, etc.)?
chrisjj12 days ago
> If you’re running autonomous or semi-autonomous agents that:
> call paid APIs
> purchase data
This is no different from using a low-IQ intern you found on the street. Why not apply the same solution?
- ArielBarack9 days ago
  I actually like the intern analogy. The gap is that interns spend at human rate and you can intervene; agents can make thousands of spend decisions/hour and retries/loops can multiply. So I’m trying to understand what people use as the “expense policy system + approval workflow + revocation” equivalent when the spender is software. What’s your practical setup for that today?