OpenAI spend caps make agents fail closed

OpenAI's API changelog says organizations and projects can now set monthly hard spend limits; when tracked usage reaches the cap, affected API requests return 429 errors. Why it matters: Agent jobs can move from useful automation to runaway cost faster than a human notices an alert. A hard cap turns billing into an operating boundary, not a dashboard someone checks after the damage.

Try this: Set a monthly hard limit for each experimental project, then test the failure path: what retries, what pauses, and what notification reaches the operator when 429s start.