Enforce Usage Limits Where the Usage Happens

Usage-based billing systems accurately record, aggregate, and price past consumption but cannot prevent costs once an event has occurred, making downstream spending limits primarily notifications rather than true controls. The passage argues that metering and entitlement checks should operate in the request path, where a proxy or access layer can verify balances and reject calls before expensive model or API usage occurs, including across third-party services. Combining usage measurement and authorization in one system reduces discrepancies caused by separate balances and stale concurrent reads, although distributed balance data remains eventually consistent and may permit limited overspend during short update windows. It recommends deliberately choosing fail-open or fail-closed behavior based on request type and applying limits at organization, customer, team, or individual-key levels so a single runaway agent does not affect all users. Beyond protecting margins, visible and reliable customer-controlled limits may encourage consumption by reducing uncertainty about usage-based bills.

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