https://shipreadyai.dev/glossary/cost-cap

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# Cost cap

The ceiling that stops one visitor spending your month's budget in an hour.

A cost cap is a hard limit on what your app can spend on a paid service, usually an AI model. It has three parts: a limit per request, a limit per user per period, and a limit for the whole account that shuts things off rather than billing on.

AI features make this urgent because the cost of one request has no natural ceiling. A long input, a long output and a loop are enough. An unauthenticated endpoint that calls a model on every request is a bill waiting for whoever finds it.

Your provider's spend limit is the backstop, not the plan. Rate limits and input length limits come first. A check from outside cannot see any of it, so AI features stay on the not-verified list.