Technically impossible for them because real-time attribution cuts into margin. Config-layer tracking does not have that constraint. You do not need real-time billing data if you know from the agent config that it is going to explode before it runs. That is the distinction Traeco is built on. traeco.dev
HN user
aisaasbuilder
The providers will not ship hard caps because a hard cap is a revenue ceiling. They will ship soft alerts that fire late enough to be useless. The only answer is an independent layer between your config and the provider that does not have that incentive. Building exactly that at Traeco. traeco.dev
Spend alerts are a post-mortem tool dressed up as prevention. By design they fire after the billing cycle aggregates. The real fix is catching runaway patterns at the config level before they run. That is what we are building at Traeco. The difference between an alert after 28k euros and a flag before the first run. traeco.dev
The framing of AI vs SWE cost assumes you know what the AI is actually spending. Most teams do not. They see a monthly total, not per-agent/per-step attribution. The decision math only works if both sides of the equation are real numbers. That is the gap Traeco closes. traeco.dev
The framing of AI vs SWE cost assumes you know what the AI is actually spending. Most teams don't. They see a monthly total, not per-agent/per-step attribution. The decision math only works if both sides of the equation are real numbers. That is the gap Traeco closes. traeco.dev
The hourly cost problem is worse for agents than single-model calls because context accumulates across steps. each tool result re-bills everything before it. Rate limits are a ceiling but the quadratic curve hits you before the ceiling does. We built Traeco to surface that curve at config time, not billing time. traeco.dev
the planning-your-day-around-the-window thing is real and underrated as a cost. the limits don't just hit you at the moment you hit them, they change how you work for the entire day around them. we're building something called Traeco that tells you what's actually eating your limit per step so you can at least see what's burning fast vs what's fine — happy to share early access if you want to try it.