I let my AI agents run unsupervised and they burned $200 in 2 hours (blog.justcopy.ai)

Classic "I'll be right back" moment that cost me real money.

Building justcopy.ai - lets you clone, customize and ship any website. Built 7 AI agents to handle the dev workflow automatically.

Kicked them off to test something. Went to grab coffee.

Came back to a $100 spike on my OpenRouter bill. First thought: "holy shit we have users!"

We did not have users.

Added logging. The agent was still running. Making calls. Spending money. Just... going. Completely autonomous in the worst possible way. Final damage: $200.

The fix was embarrassingly simple: - Check for interrupts before every API call - Add hard budget limits per session - Set timeouts on literally everything - Log everything so you're not flying blind

Basically: autonomous ≠ unsupervised. These things will happily burn your money until you tell them to stop.

Has this happened to anyone else? What safety mechanisms are you using?

Oh, they burned a lot more than $200, you just paid only $200. These things are costing way more than what people pay for them, the price heavily subsidized.

The kind of person who wants to build a website copier is exactly who I had in mind for the target of vibecoding.

Bad idea, bad execution, I like it when a plan comes together.

Even without AI, companies have been burning cash uncontrollably on cloud services. I guess it's worth it when time saved, scalability etc, is much much more valuable than money.

If you buy senior engineering hours and give them vague requirements, this is close enough to what you'll get.

[dead]

Ah so this is where the current GDP growth comes from.

This is phishing/scam heaven. I already warned some european friends in healthcare about this and hope someone considers legal steps against such unethical and dangerous practices.