Cloud Cost Controls: stop a runaway cloud or AI bill

£199, once. That covers the cost review, the caps, the automatic brake on Cloudflare, the AI spend limits, the emails and the red/amber/green cost table. There is no monthly fee because the brake runs on your own account. If you want someone to look at the table every week and act on it, the Operations Command Centre shows it on a screen alongside everything else.

Mostly no - they alert, they do not stop. Google Cloud says plainly that budgets do not cap usage; they send an email while charges keep running. Cloudflare has no hard spend cap for Workers. Where a service does offer a real cap, we set it. Where it does not, the brake is the cap. The cost table then shows every bill in one place, so you are not logging into each provider to check.

Every 5 minutes it reads how many paid requests your site served in the last 15 minutes. Above the trip level, it switches on a Cloudflare WAF custom rule that asks new page visits to pass a quick browser check. Bots fail it and never reach the part you pay for. Once traffic is calm for three checks in a row, it switches off.

Rarely, and only for a few seconds. When it trips, a new visitor may see a short automatic browser check before the page loads; most people pass without clicking anything. Customers already logged in, your app's images and machine traffic are excluded. It stays on for at least 30 minutes, and you can force it off with one setting. You get an email when it switches on and another when it switches off.

You still get the review, the caps, the AI limits and the cost table, but the automatic brake is built for Cloudflare first. On other clouds we set every real cap the provider offers and the alerts that go with it, and quote an automatic brake separately if it is worth having. Moving to Cloudflare is often cheaper anyway, and Web Development builds there by default.

Each AI feature gets a daily limit, and when it is reached the feature pauses until the next day instead of charging on. The limit sits in your own code or account, not in a promise from the AI provider. A stuck loop then costs the cap, not the month. The same pattern keeps the AI jobs in Autonomous Agent Operations cheap.

3 working days. Day 1 is the review of every bill and usage page. Day 2 sets the caps, builds the brake and adds AI limits. Day 3 proves it: we lower a limit on purpose so you can watch the table turn red and the emails arrive, then put it back. You need to give us billing read access and one admin login for Cloudflare.

Read access to your bills and usage, and one narrow key that can only switch the brake rule on and off. That key cannot read customer data, change your site or move money. Error messages are scrubbed so the key never appears in an email or a log. When the job is done you can rotate every key we used.