Tickstem
Give your AI agent a spending limit it can't break.
Autonomous agents that can spend money are powerful — and terrifying without a hard limit. Agent Spend Control gives your agent a virtual card scoped to a budget you set. The cap is enforced by the card network, so a looping or prompt-injected agent literally can't exceed it — and anything over your threshold waits for one-tap approval.
Join the waitlistThe problem
You hand an AI agent a credit card or an API that moves money, and 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, and anything over €50 needs my sign-off." So most teams either don't let agents transact at all, or bolt on brittle one-off checks.
How it works
Grant a budget
Register an agent and grant it spending authority: an amount, a period, and an auto-approve threshold — e.g. €200/month, auto-approve under €50.
Tickstem issues a scoped card
Tickstem issues a virtual card locked to that budget and you hand it to your agent — instead of your real card. The agent uses it exactly like any payment method.
The card network enforces it
Every charge is checked against the budget at the network. Under your threshold it clears instantly; over it, you get a real-time approve/reject; over the cap, it's declined. Every attempt is logged.
Why it's different
- A hard cap, not a suggestion. The limit lives on the card at the network level. A runaway or prompt-injected agent's over-limit charge is simply declined — it can't talk its way past a card decline, and it can't bypass a check you forgot to add.
- Human-in-the-loop where it matters. Small spends flow automatically; anything above your threshold waits for approval. You're not babysitting every transaction.
- Full audit trail. Every authorization request, approval, and rejection is recorded — so you can answer "what did the agent try to spend, and when?"
- 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.
Join the waitlist
Agent Spend Control is in early access. Tell us where to reach you — we'll email when it opens, and we read every reply.
Early access — I'm building the card layer now and want input from people running agents that spend. Join the waitlist; I read every reply.