We need to talk about the elephant in the Finance department.
Your engineering team just demoed a new “Customer Service Agent.” It’s amazing. It answers questions, it looks up orders, it even issues refunds. The demo was flawless.
But nobody talked about the cost.
In the demo, the agent took the “Happy Path.” It used 500 tokens. It made 2 API calls. It cost $0.02.
But in production, users don’t follow the Happy Path. Users are chaotic. And when users are chaotic, agents get confused.
When an agent gets confused, it doesn’t just stop. It loops. It retries. It hallucinates a new tool and tries to call it. It downloads a 50MB PDF to “analyze” it.
Suddenly, that $0.02 interaction becomes a $20.00 interaction.
The Denial of Wallet Attack
Security professionals worry about Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. FinOps professionals worry about Denial of Wallet attacks.
In the old world of deterministic software, a bug usually meant a crash. A crash is cheap. The program stops running.
In the new world of probabilistic software (AI), a bug often means an Infinite Loop of Reasoning. The agent keeps “thinking.” It keeps calling OpenAI. It keeps spinning up resources.
If you don’t have a hard “Circuit Breaker,” a single buggy agent can burn your entire monthly cloud budget in a weekend.
Why ‘Staging’ Won’t Save You
You might think, “We’ll catch this in Staging.”
But your Staging environment is probably a persistent, long-running cluster. If an agent goes rogue in Staging, it can still do damage. It can fill up databases. It can hit API rate limits for the entire company.
And worse, Staging is usually shared. One rogue agent ruins the environment for everyone else.
The Solution: The Economic Sandbox
We need to stop treating Agent verification as just a “Correctness” check. It is an “Economic” check.
You need to know the Unit Economics of your agent before you let it touch a credit card.
This is why ephemeral infrastructure is the only viable path for Agentic AI.
Imagine this workflow with PrevHQ:
- The Trigger: A developer opens a PR with a new agent prompt.
- The Sandbox: PrevHQ spins up a completely isolated micro-VM.
- The Simulation: We run the agent against a set of “Chaos Scenarios” (confused users, broken APIs).
- The Hard Cap: The environment has a strict time-to-live (TTL). If the agent isn’t done in 5 minutes, the universe ends. The VM vanishes.
Fail Cheap
If your agent enters an infinite loop in a PrevHQ sandbox, it costs you pennies. The VM dies. The bill stops.
If your agent enters an infinite loop in production, the bill never stops.
You cannot rely on the model to be cost-aware. You cannot prompt-engineer your way out of bankruptcy. You need infrastructure that enforces fiscal discipline by physics.
The only way to afford the Agentic future is to make failure cheap.