AI agent cost control
Cap the spend on every agent.
You can't control what you can't attribute. AI agent cost control starts with a budget on each agent and the real cost of every run — then routing and BYOK keep it there.
Why it runs away
The bill climbs where you can't see it.
Token prices fell — your monthly bill went up anyway.
Spend is one lump sum; you can't say which agent caused it.
A single retry loop or bad route can 10× a run with no warning.
Every agent hits the same expensive model, whether it needs to or not.
The four levers
Control that actually holds.
Cost control isn't a dashboard you check after the fact — it's four controls that act at request time, on every agent you run.
Budget per agent
Set a hard monthly limit on each agent. Spend is capped and attributed where the work happens — not pooled into one invoice you can't decompose.
Cost per run
Every run carries its real cost — tokens, model, latency. You see the expensive runs the moment they happen, not four weeks later on the bill.
Policy routing
Route each call to the right model by policy, not by habit. Cheap models for the easy work, strong models where it counts — decided by rules, not guesswork.
BYOK, zero markup
Bring your own provider keys. Alpha routes through your own accounts and never marks up model spend — you pay providers exactly what you always did.
Cost control is one job of the agent operating layer. Reliability and compounding intelligence are the other two.
See your number before you cap it.
Arena shows what your agents cost today — free, no keys, no integration. Control comes next.