Tickstem · Agent Spend Control

Give your AI agent a spending budget — and a record of every request.

Name: Tickstem Agent Spend Control
Brand: Tickstem

Agent Spend Control lets your agent ask for authorization before it spends. You set a budget and a period; every request is checked against what's left and authorized or denied instantly, with a full log of every attempt and email alerts at 80% of budget and when it's exhausted.

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The problem

You want an AI agent to be able to spend — on API calls, on tools, on whatever its task requires — but you're trusting a probabilistic system not to loop, hallucinate a purchase, or get prompt-injected into draining a budget. There's no native "this agent may spend at most €200 this month." So most teams either don't let agents transact at all, or bolt on brittle one-off checks in their own code.

How it works

Create an agent with a budget

Request authorization before spending

Before your agent (or the code acting on its behalf) spends, it calls the spend endpoint with an amount and a description. Tickstem checks it against what's left in the period and returns authorized or denied instantly.

See everything, get alerted before it matters

Every request — approved or denied — is logged. You get an email at 80% of budget and another when it's exhausted, so you're not the one checking a dashboard.

What this is today, plainly. Agent Spend Control is a budget authorization and tracking API — your agent's code calls Tickstem before it spends and gets an instant yes or no plus a running total. Enforcement depends on that call actually happening: this is not yet a virtual card that blocks spending at the payment network level regardless of what the agent's code does. Card-level enforcement is a planned next phase — see below if that's what you need.

Why it's useful today

A real budget check, not a prompt. Every spend request is checked against actual remaining budget via a simple API call — not an instruction telling the agent to behave.
Full audit trail. Every authorization request — approved or denied — is recorded, so you can answer "what did the agent try to spend, and when?"
Notified before it matters. Email alert at 80% of budget and when it's fully spent — not just a number you have to remember to check.
It pairs with monitoring. The same Tickstem key gives the agent a schedule, a heartbeat, and uptime checks — so you can watch the agent you just gave a budget to.

Want card-level enforcement?

Budget authorization and tracking is live today — create a free account and start using it now. A virtual card that enforces the cap at the payment network itself, regardless of what the agent's code does, is a planned next phase. Tell us if you'd use it.

This is the one phase I haven't built — I read every reply and it's the main signal I'm watching before investing in it.