The 3 AM incident

A few months ago one of my AI agents got stuck in a retry loop overnight and quietly burned through a month of credits. The provider dashboard told me about it the next morning. The support ticket got a polite "usage is final."

Provider dashboards are bills. I needed a brake.

What's actually missing in the stack

After looking at what exists, the gap was clear:

AI gateways (LiteLLM, Portkey) — great at routing, not designed to stop you.

Observability (Helicone, Langfuse) — great at explaining, after the fact.

Provider dashboards — billing history, not real-time control.

Nothing was sitting between "the agent is making a call" and "the agent has already burned $500."

Cost Firewall

Cost Firewall is a local plugin for the OpenClaw gateway.…