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Token budgeting & cost-tagging

Agent execution has a unit cost, funded from STOP savings. This standard makes that cost visible, attributed and bounded — so "cost per shipped change" is a number we manage, not a surprise on the invoice.

The rules​

  • Per-squad / per-product budgets, funded explicitly from the STOP savings plan.
  • Mandatory usage tagging — every agent run is tagged project / phase / environment, so spend attributes to work.
  • Cost-per-merged-change is the headline unit-economics metric (feeds the metrics framework).
  • Anomaly alerts — a runaway agent loop or a spend spike alerts before it burns the budget; the guardrails enforce per-session ceilings.

Why it matters​

Accelerated delivery trades human time for token spend. That trade is only sound if the spend is measured against the value shipped. Tagging + cost-per-change turns "are agents worth it?" into a number per squad, per product — the evidence base for the whole RAPID economic case.

Standards referenced: FinOps Framework.