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Set spending limits before you launch

Before launching anything, find each service's spending cap and set it: Vercel Spend Management, Supabase's spend cap, usage limits on AI APIs, and budgets on any cloud account. Free plans that stop at their limits cannot bill you; usage-billed plans can. Services with alerts but no hard cap, like AWS, are where surprise bills come from.

The checklist

  1. AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google): set a monthly usage limit in billing settings.
  2. AI coding tools: set the monthly cap on usage-billed plans.
  3. Hosting: stay on free plans that stop at limits, or turn on spend management on paid ones.
  4. Database: keep Supabase’s spend cap on.
  5. Anything on AWS or Google Cloud: set budget alerts, and know they do not stop spending.

The two classic surprise bills

  • A leaked key. Bots find it and run up usage. See never commit your .env file.
  • A loop. A bug calls an API thousands of times. Caps turn a disaster into an error message.

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