Spend
controls
Prepaid credits, three alerts, a hard stop at zero and an auto top-up you cap yourself. Nothing bills in arrears.
An agent that loops is not a rare event. Spend controls exist because the worst outcome of a bad prompt should be a paused service, not an invoice you did not agree to.
Prepaid credits
Squiid usage is funded in advance. You buy credits in USD, and they spend at par against provider prices with no markup: $1 of credit is $1 of provider usage. Squiid takes its percentage when you buy the credits, not on each call, so there is never an incentive for the gateway to make your calls more expensive.
Alerts at 75, 90 and 100 percent
As the balance draws down you are notified at three points: 75%, 90% and 100% of the balance consumed. The alerts name the services doing the spending, so a surprise is a diagnosis rather than a mystery.
Pause on zero
At zero, calls through the gateway stop. They do not queue indefinitely, they do not create an overdraft and they do not delete anything. Databases keep their data, hosted sites keep their files, email domains stay verified. Top up and the same key resumes working immediately. If you decide not to come back, handover sets out what moves: an ownership transfer where the provider supports one, an export plus documented re-creation steps everywhere else.
This is a deliberate design choice and the most important one on this page. Every metered cloud service in normal use bills in arrears, which means the first time you learn about a runaway job is after the money is gone. A prepaid balance inverts that.
Auto top-up with a monthly cap
If you are running something live, a pause is not always what you want. Auto top-up refills the balance when it drops below a threshold you choose. It takes a monthly cap, which is the part that matters: once the cap is reached, top-ups stop and the usual pause behaviour takes over. Set the cap to the largest amount you would be comfortable seeing on a statement.
Per-key limits
Issue a key per project or per agent. Usage is attributed to the key that made the call, so the dashboard answers which agent spent what, and a limit on one key bounds what that agent can consume. Revoking a key stops one agent without disturbing anything else.
Subscriptions are different
Some services are sold as a monthly plan rather than metered usage, for example a Supabase Pro plan at $25 a month. These pass through on your Squiid invoice at the provider price with no fee added, and are debited on renewal. If the balance is short at renewal, the subscription pauses in the same way metered calls do.
The invoice
One PDF a month, emailed, covering credits purchased, your plan, and any pass-through service subscriptions. It is designed to be forwarded to accounting without further explanation, which is the other half of the problem twelve separate provider receipts create.
Questions people ask
What happens when my credits run out?
Calls pause. Nothing is deleted, no data is removed and no overdraft is created. Top up and everything resumes. Subscription-priced services are debited on renewal and pause if the balance is short. If you are leaving rather than pausing, the handover page says what transfers and what has to be exported.
Will Squiid ever bill me for more than I funded?
Metered usage is drawn from a prepaid balance, so it cannot exceed what you put in. Your monthly plan and any service subscriptions you have chosen are the only recurring charges, and both are shown before you add them.
How does auto top-up work?
You set a threshold, a top-up amount and a monthly cap. When the balance falls below the threshold, Squiid buys more credits up to the cap. Once the cap is reached in a given month, top-ups stop and the balance is allowed to run down and pause.
Do credits expire?
Credits carry a twelve month expiry. Unused credits can be refunded within 24 hours of purchase; the top-up fee is not refundable. This mirrors how OpenRouter handles the same problem, verified against their FAQ on 2026-09-18.
Can I limit spending per project or per agent?
Yes, by issuing a separate key per project or per agent and setting a limit on it. Usage is attributed to the key that made the call, so the dashboard shows which agent spent what, and you can revoke one key without affecting the rest.
A runaway agent should
pause, not invoice.
Prepaid credits, alerts at 75/90/100%, pause on zero and capped auto top-up across every service in the catalog.