Long-running vs short-lived agents: how to budget both

Give a recurring agent an allowance and a one-off agent an end date

A permanent employee might keep a company card for recurring work. A contractor visiting for one assignment gets a budget for that assignment, and someone closes their access when it ends. Apply the same distinction to agents.

The agent that checks your support queue every morning needs a renewable allowance and a person who reviews its work. The agent cleaning one customer file needs a total budget and a clear stopping point. Giving both the same monthly ceiling leaves the second agent able to spend again after the month changes.

The corporate-card analogy describes delegated spending through Vaaya credentials. It does not mean each agent receives a bank-issued card. The account owner funds the account, creates a separate key, and controls its permitted spending.

Match the budget to the work's lifetime

Start with the outcome and the expected duration. A recurring task should have a review cadence. A finite task should have an acceptance condition: the file is cleaned, the research is delivered, or the agreed attempts are exhausted.

These are imaginary planning examples, not customer spending records or recommended prices:

Assignment	Example allowance	When someone reviews or closes it
Monitor a support queue	$20 per week	Review useful resolutions each week
Refresh a research report	$10 per month	Review the report before renewing its remit
Clean one imported file	$5 for the whole job	Close access when the file is accepted or the allowance is exhausted

The first two map to recurring ceilings. The third needs an application-level job budget today. Its allowance must survive process restarts, retries, and calendar changes without replenishing itself.

A recurring agent also needs a stop condition. If the support queue is retired, its spending permission should end even if the weekly amount still fits the business budget.

Use the live controls for recurring agents

Vaaya supports separate agent keys with day, week, or month spending ceilings, period usage, pause, rotation, and revocation. You can manage agents through the Vaaya setup and SDK paths. Give the deployment its own ordinary key and keep the account's primary management key on your trusted server.

The periods follow the calendar. A day resets at UTC midnight, a week on Monday, and a month on the first. They are not rolling windows measured from the moment you created the key. A task running across midnight can enter a fresh daily allowance; a job crossing a month boundary can enter a fresh monthly allowance.

A ceiling limits the key's permitted spending from the owner's account. Creating that key does not deposit money into a separate wallet or reserve its entire allowance. Other keys can spend from the same account, so review the business's available funds alongside each agent's allowance.

For a long-running deployment, put a named person and a review date beside its key in your own records. Compare period usage with delivered work. If the agent spent its allowance without producing the expected report, inspect the failed attempts before increasing it. Pause the key while investigating when further calls would add little value.

Keep a one-off job's total in your application

For a finite assignment, create a separate ordinary key and set an appropriate period ceiling as one control. Then track the assignment's lifetime allowance in your application. A period ceiling alone cannot express “spend at most $5 on this import, however long it takes.”

Persist a job record with its owner, acceptance condition, total allowance, committed spending, settled charges, and outstanding provider job IDs. Before launching paid work, check the remaining allowance and reserve the proposed amount. Use an atomic update so parallel workers cannot both promise the same remaining money.

The application owns that job ledger. These steps describe an integration pattern, not a native Vaaya job-budget screen. Reconcile a reservation with the actual outcome, and retain it while the result of an uncertain request is unresolved. A timeout does not prove that a provider did no work.

Use supported idempotency controls when retrying the same operation. For asynchronous work, save the returned job ID and retrieve its result instead of creating a replacement job to check progress. Include paid retries and fallbacks in the same assignment budget.

Close the assignment without losing the receipts

When the result meets the acceptance condition, stop scheduling new work and reconcile outstanding requests. Then revoke the job's key through the owner's management path. A forgotten deployment should not retain spending access because nobody wrote the cleanup step.

Revocation stops later authenticated calls. It does not cancel work a provider has already accepted, retrieve money already spent, or erase receipts. If cancellation is available for a particular service, handle it through that service's supported workflow and record the result.

For recurring agents, a temporary pause can be more useful during review than deleting the deployment's identity. Keep the relationship between the key, deployment, and delivered outputs in your own records so a later reviewer can understand why spending changed.

Coming soon: controls that follow the assignment

Automatic expiry, native lifetime allowances for ordinary agent jobs, and configurable budget alerts are Coming soon. They should eventually reduce the cleanup and monitoring an application owner handles today. Do not assume that a calendar ceiling already provides those behaviors.

The corporate-card guide covers how to delegate spending across a team of agents. The treasury guide covers the business funds those allowances depend on.

Start with one recurring deployment and one finite job. Give each a separate key, record who reviews it, and write down the event that ends its spending permission.

Questions

Does a daily spending ceiling mean a rolling 24-hour budget?

No. Vaaya's per-key ceilings use calendar periods: days reset at UTC midnight, weeks on Monday, and months on the first. A period ceiling does not limit total spending across a job's lifetime.

Can I give a one-off job an automatically expiring Vaaya key?

Automatic expiry and a native job-lifetime allowance for ordinary agent keys are Coming soon. Today, your application tracks the job's total budget and revokes its separate key when the work ends.

Does revoking a key cancel work already running?

Revocation prevents later authenticated calls. It does not cancel a provider job that already started or reverse charges. Save job IDs and reconcile outstanding work before closing the job's accounts.