Issue virtual cards to your agents. Set hard spending limits per task, per day, per model. Get per-run cost attribution and kill switches — before your overnight Claude run empties your API budget.
Agents that can't pay for things need a human to intervene at every paywall, API quota, and service boundary. Every interruption is latency. Every human-in-the-loop for a $0.50 charge is wasted time.
Agents running Exa searches to gather data, monitor competitors, or enrich records burn metered queries continuously. Scoped cards give each agent a search budget that hard-stops when spent.
Spinning up a sandbox, running eval harnesses, scaling a Kubernetes job — dev agents burn cloud credits overnight. You need per-run attribution and hard ceilings.
Data enrichment, web scraping, email sending, domain lookups — agents consume metered APIs continuously. Scoped cards let each agent pay for exactly what it needs.
Paywalled datasets, academic journals, financial data feeds, market intelligence — research agents need micro-purchasing capability at the moment of retrieval.
ElevenLabs for voice, Runway for video, Midjourney for images, Suno for audio — creator agents generating assets need scoped budgets tracked per project and per output.
Restocking inventory, booking travel, purchasing software licenses, paying for services — operations agents that can actually execute save your team from every approval loop.
Each agent — or each run — gets a virtual card with a hard spending ceiling. A nightly Devin session gets $50. A Claude Code task gets $10. Nothing more, ever.
→ Scope by agent, task, or run.Limits aren't soft warnings in a dashboard. They're enforced by the card network. When the envelope is spent, the card declines. No runaway spend. No 3am surprise bills.
→ Hard limits. Not suggestions.See cost broken down by agent, by task, by model, by API vendor. Know your unit economics per workflow run before you scale. Flag anomalies before they compound.
→ Per-run cost attribution.The HTTP 402 standard lets your API respond "Payment Required" and receive payment — automatically, from agents that have a wallet. No human checkout flow. No API key sharing. Just a paywall agents can cross.
Return a standard 402 response with a payment amount and address. Any agent using Storyline's payment infrastructure can pay automatically and retry. No integration with each buyer required.
// Return 402 when payment is required if (!hasValidPayment(req)) { return res.status(402).json({ error: "Payment Required", amount: 0.05, currency: "USD", payment_url: "https://pay.storylinedirector.com/..." }); }
Agents built with Storyline Director's payment SDK intercept 402 responses, authorize payment against their scoped card, and retry — within the spending envelope you defined. Zero human intervention.
Not dashboard warnings. Not soft alerts. Hard limits enforced by the card network — the same infrastructure banks use.
Issue a card for a single workflow run. When the task completes or the budget exhausts, the card expires. Nothing left to charge against.
Set a maximum daily spend per agent. Resets at midnight. Prevents runaway loops from doing compounding overnight damage.
Restrict a card to a specific vendor or merchant category. A code agent's card can only charge API providers — not travel, not retail.
One API call kills any card immediately. Integrates with your alerting: anomalous spend triggers auto-cancel before the next transaction clears.
Every charge tagged to agent ID, run ID, task type, and vendor. Know your unit economics before you scale. Export to CSV or push to your data warehouse.
Flag when an agent spends 2× its baseline, charges an unexpected vendor, or exceeds hourly thresholds. Slack webhook, email, or API callback.