THE $500M ACCIDENT THAT BROKE THE INTERNET

Cap your agent at $50/day.
Auto-kill before auto-bankrupt.

RelayPlane Pro turns your AI agent into one that refuses to spend more than you told it to. Hard caps per session, per day, per API key. Runaway-loop detection. Auto-downgrade at 80%. $29/month.

$500M
Accidentally spent
TechStartups, May 2026
$6,000
Burned overnight
makeuseof
$60
Single prompt
r/ClaudeCode, 135 upvotes
$400
In 24 hours
dev.to
$47K
Agent post-mortem
community

How it works

Three steps. No SaaS dependency. The kill happens at your proxy before the request leaves your machine.

1. You set the cap.

relayplane cap set --day 50

One CLI command. Per session, per day, or per API key. The proxy reads it on the next request.

2. The proxy enforces it.

Every request checks the day's running total against the cap. No SaaS in the middle. The check runs locally on every call.

3. Cap hit. Request killed.

429 cost_cap_exceeded

Returns a 429. Alerts fire. Auto-downgrade kicks in. Resets at midnight UTC.

What you get on Pro

Hard cost caps

Per session, per day, per API key. Configured via CLI or the Cost Guardrails page.

Auto-kill at threshold

Request denied at the proxy, returns 429 cost_cap_exceeded, Telegram and email alerts fire.

Runaway-loop detection

N retries inside W seconds, session marked runaway, killed, alert.

Auto-downgrade at 80%

Opus drops to Sonnet, Sonnet drops to Haiku, until cap resets. Configurable ladder.

Audit trail of every kill

relayplane kills --last 7d shows what was killed, why, and how much it saved. 7 days on Pro, 30 days on Max.

Existing Pro observability stays

Model breakdown, sessions panel, agent attribution, anomaly alerts.

Why $29 and not $9

Helicone Pro is $20 for observability. Langfuse is $29 for alerts. Portkey gates hard caps to $49+ Enterprise. Portal26 is Series-A pricing.

$9 buys you a dashboard. $29 buys you a proxy that refuses to ruin your week.

Cheap enough for an indie dev. Expensive enough that the buyer assumes it actually works.

MIT licensed|npm: @relayplane/proxy|runs locally, keys stay on your infra|OpenAI-compatible

Stop your agents from auto-bankrupting you.

Install RelayPlane, set a cap, and your agents physically cannot spend more than you told them to. $29/month after the free tier proves the install works.

npm install -g @relayplane/proxy

Free tier covers credential pool + observability. Pro adds hard caps and auto-kill. No credit card on free.