Token Governance 101: Caps, Roles, and Dashboards First

The company that spent 500 million dollars in a month did not have a model problem. It had a permissions problem. Nobody set a cap.

Turn the guardrails on before the keys go out

The providers already ship the controls. They just have to be configured before you hand out access, not after the invoice arrives. Set per-user and per-team caps. Use role-based limits, because not everyone needs the frontier model to do their job. Stand up a real-time dashboard with alerts at 50 and 80 percent of budget, and a kill switch you can actually reach.

Treat token spend exactly like cloud spend. Budgets, alerts, and accountability. Governance is boring, and it is the entire difference between a useful tool and a balance-sheet event.