Building Out Loud: When the LLMs drain your bank account (and How to Prevent It)

In this episode of Building Out Loud, Faith shares a weekend incident while preparing Discoveree to go live: updates to competitor profiles triggered repeated refresh errors, causing the system to retry every few seconds and run via Gemini (then Perplexity), rapidly consuming her LLM budgets and auto-recharging until it drained her business account by a couple of thousand pounds. 

They discuss how AI agents can behave like an “intelligent but idiotic intern,” the emotional impact of being responsible for the code, and the safeguards Faith added—circuit breakers after three failures, requiring a user login to trigger 24-hour schedules, and segregating LLM spend into a separate bank account—plus knock-on costs like Langfuse overages and account blocks.

00:00 Welcome and Heatwave
00:49 Big Weekend Incident
00:58 Product Updates Before Launch
01:47 Runaway Refresh Drains Budget
02:29 How Bad Was It
04:15 AI Intern and Safeguards
05:49 Spend Limits and Auto Recharge
06:51 Segregating Accounts and Tool Costs
08:17 Phishing Like Feeling
09:30 Monitoring Agents and Alerts
10:18 Lessons Learned and Wrap Up