Build an LLM Spend Governor: Budget Caps in Python

Your AI bill is the new outage

On June 26, 2026, CNBC ran a story that landed hard across engineering Slacks and Hacker News: the era of tokenmaxxing is over. Uber told its staff it had burned through an entire annual AI budget in four months and slapped a $1,500-per-month-per-employee cap on usage. Lindy's CEO Flo Crivello moved 100% of his company's API traffic off frontier models to a cheaper open-weight provider and watched the cost curve, in his words, "crash to the ground."