Automation cost control: 8 steps to prevent automation cost overruns
Primary keyword: automation cost control
You shipped automations — congratulations. This checklist gives eight concrete, tool-level steps you can run in 60–120 minutes to cap costs and catch billing spikes early. Use these settings first, then layer governance like audit trails and access control.
Checklist (short):
- Capture a baseline: record monthly spend and recent 7/30 day usage (API calls, runs, storage).
- Set hard caps and per-workflow quotas to stop runaway costs.
- Audit plan tiers and hidden metered items (premium connectors, third-party API calls).
- Cap retries with exponential backoff and route failures to a dead letter queue.
- Prefer event-driven triggers (webhooks); if polling is required, increase intervals or batch.
- Trim log and data retention to required windows and archive older data to cheaper storage.
- Disable or remove unused connectors and premium actions.
- Instrument billing alerts and spike detection (50/75/90% thresholds, Slack/email/PagerDuty).
Start with the baseline, apply steps 1–3 this week, and enable alerts to detect spikes quickly. These small, targeted actions provide immediate guardrails for predictable automation spend.